


reflections of a mad one

by blindeye



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, One Shot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:34:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25176988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blindeye/pseuds/blindeye
Summary: a prison cell is a lonely place, and redemption comes at a steep cost.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Azula/Ty Lee (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 82
Kudos: 134





	1. conversations with a prince

**Author's Note:**

> Azula deserved a redemption arc, and if no one else will do it, i will. 
> 
> a collection of one-shots examining how she could possibly be redeemed. 
> 
> enjoy.

Azula picks at the walls.

She picks until the stone is under her nails in a fine grit. She picks until her nails bleed, and she keeps picking until the grit and blood form a paste on her fingers. A part of her finds it distasteful - imperfect, jagged edges. Another part of her thinks its a useful distraction.

Her cell is quiet.

Thick stone walls that she cannot burn, though the black scorch marks prove she tried. Small, slitted windows with bars that would take months to melt through. Her hands and feet are chained to the walls, manacles made of heavy black iron. She has been trying to work away at it, but weeks in and theirs barely a dent. She suspects the guards change them when they drug her food. Zuko, in his oh so beneficial mercy, has provided her with a mattress, thin rug, metal desk, and chair. There's a thick iron door, vents in the ceiling where water ominously creaks, and not an inch of wood or anything she could use as a weapon. She's fairly sure that the door simply leads to a series of antechambers, layers of iron separating her from the outside.

Smart. She smiles from her fetal position on the ground - they fear her. They still fear her. They fear her enough to call in the Earth Kingdom's finest metal workers, and they should. Given enough time, she can work away at the bars. Given enough time, she could get to one of the guards. She knows it, as well as she knows that her meals will arrive precisely twice a day, that she will escape this place. That her traitorous, failure of a brother, will be deposed. That she will stand next to her father, that they'll reconquer the Fire Nation, and he will look at her, never smile, no, but tell her that's he's proud. 

But he left her.

He. Left. Her.

Zuko won. Zuko's the Fire Lord. Zuko, the pathetic one, the weak one, a brother so profoundly unskilled she is surprised he didn't manage to get himself killed while fruitlessly sailing the world, is the Fire Lord.

And she is in here.

She can feel whatever it is rise. Shame? But she has nothing to be ashamed of. Hurt? She could not care less about Zuko. Loneliness? She had been alone her whole life. She didn't need anyone - she never had, unless traitors like Mai and Ty Lee counted. Farther had so carefully explained it, and it made sense. You cannot be hurt if you only have yourself. Fear. Fear is the only reliable way. 

The cell is so dark now. She must have been lying here for hours.

She tries to push herself up. She tries, but her muscles are so weak from weeks of inactivity, of the poor food, from everything, that she collapses onto the ground. 

She feels the tears hot on her cheeks.

She tries to force them back in, great shuddering breaths and sniffing so hard her sinuses feel like their on fire. She knows how weak she must look. Pathetic. Useless. The tears come harder, so she shoves her hands as far as they go into her sockets, pressing down, down, down, until the tears stop flowing. She must not cry. Crying is weak. Crying is pathetic, Farther would say, as he laid a hand that was uncomfortably warm on her shoulder after she failed to perform. Fire Lords do not cry, so you do not cry Azula, he said. You would not want to cry like your brother now, would you Azula?

"Your meal, Princess," the guard says. A bowl of mush is pushed through a slat, and even now, there is a tinge of fear and reverence in the guard's voice. She takes it, holds it close to her chest. Her brother might think otherwise, but there is a fear and rightly given respect still of the royal family by Fire Nation citizens. Even supposedly mad, disposed ones. 

She laughs at that. Perhaps she is mad. Perhaps she is the only sane one left in a nation full of traitors and cowards. 

She drags herself by her hands to the bowl, pushes herself up and slouches against the wall. The mush is barely visible in the dark cell, but Azula knows its grey. Her stomach curdles at the thought of it, but she must keep her strength up. For her escape. She lifts a spoonful of the mush to her mouth with her fingers. They stopped giving her spoons after she melted it down and tried to spear a guard with it. 

There a bang on the door.

The slit opens. The mush falls back into her plate with a wet plop.

Zuko stands there.

Zuko stands there for the first time. He's wearing formal robes, and there are haggard circles underneath his eyes. 

He looks exhausted. He looks confused. He looks like the little lost boy that she knows he is, dressed in robes to big that should've been hers. 

He is wearing the crown, and she wants to claw from his head with her own hands. 

He doesn't say anything, face carefully impassive. He simply watches her, and she watches him back, and they stare at each other for a long time. She knows he’s' probably taking in the sight of her - gaunt cheeks, hair shaved to her scalp, bloody fingernails, ragged clothes. She will not let herself be shamed by him, so she raises on eyebrow gracefully. 

"What happened to your mattress?" Zuko asks. She follows his gaze to where her mattress, or what's left it, sits. 

"I burnt it. To ashes. Then I threw it in a guard’s face. They removed the bars where that slit is now," she snaps, and she smiles at Zuko's repulsed expression. So easy to rile. So pathetically moved by someone, he should know simply doesn't matter. "I threw red hot ashes in her face and laughed about it Zuko." After all, she's a monster. The mad sister, the cruel one, the wrong one. Why not play the part? 

"I'm not playing your games Azula," he spits. He wraps a hand around the bars. "I came here to tell you something, but I don't have to."

"Zuzu, you didn't want to visit your own sister? How rude. You've left me in here for weeks with nothing," she tries to keep her voice mocking, but a bite creeps into her voice, "and you've only now decided to grace me with your presence. The great Fire Lord. Coming to visit me. What could be so important?"

"Mother is alive. I know where she is and I'm going to find her. I thought you should know, even if you don't deserve it."

She knows she's going mad.

Her heart is pounding in her ears, _what is wrong with that girl, what is wrong with that girl _, as she feels herself sink lower and lower, further and further into the floor. Traitor. Mother. Worthless. What would Farther say? What would Father do? Zuko can't, he can't, he can't just say something like that and leave. She feels herself start to cry again, and Zuko is shocked, so she tries to smirk at him, but it comes out more like a grimace.__

____

She's going mad.

____

She is mad. She's mad and no one told her. She must be mad because she knows Mother is dead, because why would Father lie? 

____

_But he does lie. He lies, to you, to Zuko, your whole life is one extended lie, and you use fear to control people, to play along in a sick twisted script. ___

______ _ _

"Azula. AZULA," Zuko yells, panic in his voice. He wraps both hands around the bars, his face panicky as she rocks back and forth and back and forth, trying to shove the tears back inside through will alone. He looks almost crazed, the flesh on his scar burning an angry, glistening, red. "Stop it!"

______ _ _

He walks backward. He unpeels his hands from the bar, melted flakes of metal sticking to his skin. Azula watches him compose himself. Watches him look at her with pity, and she can hear him think it. _She's mad. She's well and truly mad, just like Father. ___

________ _ _ _ _

"I'm sorry," he whispers and leaves.

________ _ _ _ _

Alone.

________ _ _ _ _

She cries freely now that he is gone. She cries and cries and cries until she cannot cry anymore, so she just breaths in and out choky gasps of air and clutches her aching lungs. All the while her mother's voice whispers, weak and pathetic, in a fever hazed delirium.

________ _ _ _ _

_What is wrong with that child? ___

____

________ _ _ _ _

____


	2. what's a lifetime in a cell?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god, get this girl some therapy.

Fist out. Breathe in. Push up. Breathe out. Hot flames on her breath, fire bubbling underneath her fingertips.

A roar of flame that makes the shadows dance joyously on the sooty walls.

Left leg down. Breathe in. Crouch down. Breathe out. She punches as hard and fast as she can, the heat coursing up her arm.

Azula smiles as her fire burns so brightly at the tips of her fingers that it lights up her pitch-black cell in a flash of beautiful blinding white. Her flame always burned brighter, hotter, hotter even than Zuko's and she felt a familiar rush of pride at the thought. She knew she was better. Her fire bending proved it.

She moves around the cell. Her muscles burn, her breath comes hard and fast, but it feels so good. The clank of her manacles and the soft pants of her breath are the only sounds as she moves through one form to another, controlled and sharp and precise. She misses a step, and she bites her lip hard enough to break it in frustration.

Almost is not good enough.

She draws in a breath, feels her lungs expand and she bows low, kicking her legs out and sending a pinwheel of fire swirling around the cell that leaves burning sparks dangling like mini stars in the inky blackness.

They burn and flicker and die.

"Wow," a voice says.

She whirls, dropping into a stance. It's too dark to see their face, but a figure stands at her cell door. The bright blue of his tattoo is stark against the dank stone.

"Avatar."

"Uh, yep," he says. He's barely tall enough to be seen through the slit. She can hear a tremor in his voice, his words are shaky and unsure. "Azula, right? The Fire Lord sent me."

"No. Wrong prisoner," she snaps. He takes a step backward from the slit, but steels himself. "What do you want? Or are you just an errand boy for Zuko?"

"Right. Sorry. The Fire Lord - I mean, I did, wanted to talk to you. Well, needed to talk to you. About your bending."

She narrows her eyes. He sounds apprehensive but curious. Like he's examining her, weighing her with some invisible scales in his head. "What?"

"I- well, we agreed, that I might have to take it away."

She freezes. She blinks. Her gut sinks and sinks even further as she realizes this isn't some cruel joke. The Avatar is serious. He isn't laughing, he isn't smiling, he's just staring through the slit with a pensive look on his face. She feels panic creeping up her limbs, and she hides her shaking hands behind her back. He can't. He can't just do that. _Is that what happened to Father? Is that why he hasn't broken out? Is that why he hasn’t rescued her?_

"Zuko - well, I'm not sure! Probably not!" he holds up both his hands as if he's taming a wild animal, "Its just that, your such a threat. And it's my duty as the Avatar to restore balance to the world. We really don't want to."

The words hit her like a blow to the head. It leaves her reeling, head stuffed full of cotton. Zuko said that? Does Zuko want this? She feels her breath come short and rapid. Of course, he does. Of course, he would want to take away the thing that so aptly proves how much better she than him. Jealous, spiteful Zuzu, desperately clawing her down even when she's locked in a cell.

"Zuko wants that?" she says, and her voice comes out small.

"No. He said he would consider it and sent me here to get my opinion since you keep threatening the guards and throwing deadly implements at them. You tried to bribe them. You promised them positions in the Restored Fire Nation, Azula," he says. His voice is sympathetic but firm. "We both know you want your Father back on the throne."

Of course she does. _Of course_ she does. She needs it. She wants it. It’s true and right and good that Father is on the throne, that she's by his side ruling. It’s what she was born to do.

"Yes."

"And you don't think that's wrong?" he says.

"No. Why would I?"

"I'm sorry you think that Azula," and the Avatar's voice is full of pity. "The Fire Nation was cruel. And so was your father."

"I don't need your pity Avatar," she spits. Rising, she stalks over to the slit and presses her hands to it. She’s eye to eye with him, the metal cool on her burning skin. "My Father was good. I don't know what lies Zuko told you, but he deserved everything Father did. He is weak. You'll see it soon. You all will. And poor little Zuzu will beg for my help."

The Avatar shakes his head. She smirks at him, and flames dance on her fingertips, casting their faces in shades of shadow and gold but he doesn't falter. Why isn't he scared? She will make him fear her - he does fear her. They all do. Zuko does and that stupid Water Tribe peasant that came with him,, Mai and Ty Lee and even Mother.

They are just hiding it. He is just hiding it.

"My Grandfather should have eradicated you with the rest of the Air Nomads," and as she says it she can feel a grin spreading wide, wider over her face until it stretches her lips like a haunted mask and she thinks her lips might crack and split with the pressure of it. "Perhaps it's better that he didn't. I can watch my Father do it in person instead."

The Avatar does not even react.

He just watches her with a distant cold pity, from distant grey eyes. Like she is a dying bird fallen from its nest, too far gone to save.

Maybe she is. No. No, she can't be mad - she has to be perfect. She is perfect. She must be. She can't be.

"I'm not going to take your bending Azula. I'm not going to do anything to you. I know what the monks taught me. Every life, even yours, even your Fathers, has value. You can either spend the rest of your life in this cell, or you can choose to be better, but it's no one’s fault but your own that you're here," his tone softens, and she almost gags at his weakness. "I hope you make the right choice. I do."

Before she can think, she shoves her fingers through the slats. She forces all of it, the pain and the rage and the misery into her bending. She feels the heat hot on her breath and it explodes from her fingers with a roar. The flames turn the metal red, and dimly, she can hear the pops and sizzles of blisters forming on her fingers.

She’s immediately doused with ice-cold water. It steals the air from her lungs. It chills her bones. It leaves her hair sticking to her head in clumps, and the roar of water from the pipes above is deafening, a steady screech that forces her to clap her hands to her ears.

The Avatar stares at her through the downpour, and his eyes are as flat and as grey as the stone around them. There’s a faint pop of air pressures changing as whatever was left of her fire is extinguished by a roar of wind from his palm.

“Make the right choice Azula.”

The Avatar leaves her alone.

He leaves her to her thoughts that beat and howl on the inside of her skull. She stares at her chains and wonders if she could melt them down, could fashion them into a knife. Slice her head open and scrape it clean. Purge it of this confusion. Of this weakness.

She is too exhausted to cry.

Her bones hurt. She shivers as she slides down the wall.

When had she gotten so weak?

She burnt her blanket out of spite, so she settles for staring at the pile of ash where it should have been. She wants out. She wants out so desperately, so keenly, that it physically hurts. She tries to be angry. She tries to feel something, but all she feels is a numbness that deepens with every breath she drags through her chattering teeth.

She is going to die in here.

The realization strikes her. Not with a sudden impact. With a creeping, growing sense of cold that makes the water pooling in her cell seem warm by comparison. She’s going to spend the rest of her life here. Her hair will turn grey, and the prison itself might change, but she’s never truly going to be free again.

Unless she convinces them to release her.

She can feel the half beginnings of a plan start to turn in her head.

Perhaps they weren’t smart enough. If Zuko is stupid enough to let her out, then there is a chance. If he’s foolish enough to be unafraid – then there’s a chance. A small, slim, chance that she could escape. Set things right again. Set it all right again.

_What if Father has lost his bending? What if they aren’t scared of you anymore? What if Zuko doesn’t fear you?_

She digs her nails into her palms.

_She will make them fear her. ___

____

____

____

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now its getting juicy.
> 
> thank you to everyone that commented. feedback is so appreciated, and people that leave big comments make my day. not sure how i feel 100% about this chapter so i might take it down and re edit it, but I'm really proud of some of the lines. you've been warned.


	3. lying comes naturally

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> manipulative azula = best azula

Azula watched the guard slip her food through the slit.

_It wasn’t gruel._

She picked up the plate with reverence and held it up to the small stream of light threading its way through the narrow bars high above her. She couldn’t believe her eyes as she watched the rice turn translucent in the morning sun. Burnt rice with charred slices of meat that were red and pink in the middle. Still meat. Still rice. She forced herself to eat it slowly, savour the smells and the taste and the flavour. She felt herself stiffen at the thought, but chewed. Reduced to salivating over food that a poor peasant would even consider below them. She knew that she couldn’t afford to refuse it – weeks on a diet of mush had left her week and feverish. Collarbones of stiff lines and hollows in her cheeks that turned her fine features into a mockery of brittle bones and harsh slopes.

_Weak._

She bit down harder on the meat and felt blood dribble down her chin.

_Disgusting._

She wiped at her mouth with her sleeves. New clothes. A loose-fitting shirt and lumpy pants. A new bed, with a thicker mattress. Good behaviour rewards. Like a pet that performed a trick – _oh Azula, you didn’t try to stab a guard in three weeks! Azula, you haven’t even tried to escape today!_

She suffered through it. The shameful act of humility. She bowed and scraped to the guards, prostrated herself neatly. She sat quietly in her cell and didn’t threaten them with banishment. She asked meekly for news about Zuko’s health, for tidings about the Fire Nation. She nearly bit off her tongue when she begged for news about Uncle Iroh, the fat, quivering coward. She imagined him choking on tea leaves to console herself, his lips turning a rotten blue the colour of spoiled meat.

It took weeks of meekness to convince the guards to give her a pen and paper.

They handed it through the slit, and she did not miss the tremor in the guard’s hands when he did. She bowed– Agni, she bowed to a _servant_ – and sat at the metal desk.

Her hand trembled as she wrote, and Azula cursed herself for the weakness.

She plied every ounce of fake regret onto the page. She consoled and whispered and begged. She begged Zuko to remember their childhood. She begged him to give her a chance – just one more chance. Like Iroh had done for him. She wrote about how much she’d changed, how the weeks (or was it months?) in the prison had made her rediscover herself. Had forced her to look inward – to realize just how flawed she was. How flawed Father was, how evil and wrong and crooked, how the very core of him was rotten, like a festering wound that needed to be cauterized. Removed from his position, removed from their world. 

She nearly snapped the pen in half when she wrote it.

Of course, she knew he’d dismiss all of it. He had locked her in here to _avoid_ thinking about her – how inconvenient she was, how much of a problem her existence is. If she is breathing, Zuko’s reign would always be underscored with a _what if?_ He was so convinced of his own excellence, so confident in his weakness, of his new ‘peace’ that she couldn’t be free to challenge it. An inconvenient reminder of the past he was so desperate to escape. She hated him, and he hated her, and that was the ugly truth of it, because he couldn’t understand, couldn’t accept that she was _better_. Better at firebending. Better at ruling. Better at gaining her Father's approval. Better in so many ways that she’d stopped counting them, until the tally grew between them that it was impassable as the highest mountain or deepest chasm.

So, she wrote what she’d know would hurt him. The only sound in the cell was the stroke of ink on paper. She didn’t feel regret. Didn’t feel anything but grim satisfaction as the words formed on the paper, the ink dark enough to wrap her lies tight.

_I know where Mother is. If you want to find her, you’ll need me. Father had many secrets, and I know this one. Please Zuko. I don’t know if her location is still accurate. The trail was old and we only have so much time._

_You can’t abandon her. Work with me, or you will._

She waited. For days after the letter was sent, she sat cross-legged on the floor.

Doubt edged its way into her mind, stole around corners, and crawled to her ears. Perhaps Zuko would ignore her. Perhaps he had given up the search for Mother. Perhaps he did not believe her – the letter was a half-truth swaddled in lies. She clamped her jaw hard enough to crack her teeth and forced herself to calm. Push down against the fear – _what if you're stuck in here forever, what if he never comes, what if you die in here, what if it’s too late._

The slit to her cell opened with a _screech_.

“Your lying Azula,” Zuko snapped. He stood poised, one hand almost thrust through the slit, his knuckles white and tight from his grip. He looked ragged, raw, red, his hair falling out of his bun and crown perched lopsidedly. Bloodshot eyes and deep, dark bags underneath them. He held up the letter in one hand. She watched as the paper smoked, flames licking at the edges, racing up and down the ink until ashes danced and spun and fell. “You always do. This is sick. I’m not – I won’t encourage whatever this is.”

“Zuko. Calm down,” she said. She smiled sweetly and watched as Zuko clenched his jaw. “It was just a letter.”

“Stop it! Stop! You know it wasn’t just a letter. You know where Mother is, and you’re going to tell me,” Zuko spat, voice thick with equal parts anger and desperation.

_Whiny and weak Zuzu. You can’t find Mother alone. You wouldn’t have come here unless your desperate. You can’t hide anything. You never could. To soft._

“Zuzu. You know I’m not going to just tell you. You’re not stupid. I want out. I’ve changed Zuko. I want to help you,” she said, and the lies were as sweet as the Fire Nation’s finest honey on her tongue.

“You think I’m an idiot Azula? You haven’t changed. This is just one grand lie or one big plot to get yourself out of this cell. You have no idea where Mother is, and you never have.”

“Neither do you Zuko.”

Zuko recoiled. He tried to stare her down, but she watched the blood drain from his face, and Azula knew she’d wounded him.

“You’ve run yourself ragged Zuko. You’re no closer to finding her, and you know it. Maybe you’ll try and convince yourself that you don’t need me. Maybe you think it's possible to search every corner of the Four Nations for a single woman, but she’ll be dead long before you search even a tenth of it,” and she sunk her teeth into the wound and _tore_ , “and you’ll never see her. She was banished because of you Zuko. She might even be _dead_ because of _you_. And you’re going to abandon her for what? Your pride? Your honour? Your fear?”

She felt no shame as Zuko began to cry. Slowly, painfully, tears pooling in the corners of his eyes as he stared at her with hate and distaste so fierce, she didn’t suppress the shiver in her spine. She saw his resolve weakening, but he clung on as a drowning man clings to timber in the storm.

“Prove to me you’re not lying. Give me a reason to believe you Azula. Anything,” Zuko said. His voice broke on the last word.

She shrugged. “Father has secret rooms in the palace. Behind the portraiture of the family. There’s a small door – you need to be able to firebend to open it. He hoarded things. There are letters from Mother in there with a lead. I won’t tell you where exactly, but the fact that the door exists should be an indication of my good faith.”

Zuko nodded. The movement was jerky, like his head was being yanked on a string. “And if I find it?”

“Then you let me help you.”

“I can search the room without you,” he whispered, “I can. I will.”

_Stubborn. Always so stubborn._

“Perhaps if you had a decade to spare Zuzu.”

_Your desperate Zuko. Desperate enough to accept this._

“What is your plan, exactly, Zuko? Leave me in here to rot?” she spat. She pushed herself off the floor and strode to the door, so they were eye to eye, close enough that she could see how his fingernails were bitten to the ends. “As long as I’m alive, your rule as the Fire Lord isn’t secure. You want to find Mother, but you’re not willing to work with me.”

“Do you even care? About Mother? Or is this just a game to you?”

She shrugged. “Does it matter?”

_You know it matters. You hate her. You miss her. You love her. You're afraid of her. You want everything and nothing from her._

“Yes, Azula. For the love of Agni, _yes_ it does,” he said. He stared at her, and she could feel him trying to decipher her words. Peel them apart and root through every nook to find some semblance of warmth.

She gave him nothing. She stared and stared until her gaze was as empty and cold as the cell itself, and Zuko stiffened and slipped out of the cell without a word, and she was left watching the tear tracks of melted iron he burnt run in rivers of molten metal.

_You’re a monster._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> damn this chapter was fun to write, if a bit meandering. might re takedown, edit, and re-upload to make it a tad more concise but I'm happy with it for the moment. from this point on in the fic, I'll be staying closeish to the plot of the comic series the Search, with a more one-shot sorta feel - little peeks into recovery - as i'm not planning to make this an epic saga. 
> 
> thanks to everyone that reads + comments.


	4. graveyard of parchment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> damn, she actually does something decent.

The Royal Palace is quiet.

Footsteps of marching soldiers don’t echo around the halls. There aren’t the constant calls of advisors, the hurrying of generals with maps balanced under their arms from war room to war room. There aren’t even servants – legions of blanks that ghosted through the halls to serve their every whim.

_Father’s anger doesn’t stifle the air anymore._

Azula sits alone in a room. Her arms are bound behind her with iron, and her feet are chained to the floor. There’s a hood over her eyes, but she can still hear the soft breathing and movement of guards nearby. Her heads pounding from whatever drug they snuck in her food to keep her docile on the trip over.

_Zuko took the bait._

Shackled and constrained as she was bundled into a wagon. A hood pulled tight over her head at the sight of the palace. The glimpse made her knees go weak, so two burly guards carted her through the halls, before roughly dumping her here. She feels woozy, like the floor might give way at any second. Her stomach’s churning and her temple pounds with a steady beat. Azula can feel drool – her own drool – drying on her cheek, and the hopelessness of it all, the pain and indignity and humiliations makes tears prickle at the corner of her eyes. She tries to savour the satisfaction of her plan, but the hood’s to tight over her face to be able to think, the air hot and humid to the point where it makes her sweat rivers, her clothes sodden and sticky on her back. She can feel herself hyperventilating, breathing hard and fast as she bites back the urge to scream.

_Even when your strong, you’re weak_

“What are you doing to her!? Move!”

Then Azula starts screaming. It comes out more like a muffled grunt, half wheeze and she feels her lungs break with the effort of it. She knows that voice. She knows it as well as her own heartbeat, the heat in her blood, and the fire on her lips. Traitor. Coward. Friend.

_Something more?_

She can hear hurried footsteps and the _thwack_ of something heavy hitting the ground.

Her hood is yanked off her head, and Ty Lee stares at her.

Her eyes are still warm. She still wears an obnoxious amount of pink. She’s still Ty Lee.

The lack of fear in her gaze is new, though. The honesty – the frank look of pity mixed with concern – is new. No secrets between them. No veiled threats. Ty Lee looks at her like she’s a stranger.

_Maybe you always were to her._

The hood hits the ground. Azula tries to take a few breaths to compose herself, but it won’t work. She settles for crying silently and tucks her head into her shoulder until all she can see is cloth. Weak. Weaker still to cry in front of others. She can feel movement beside her, and Ty Lee tries to rest a hand on her shoulder. Azula flinches so hard that she almost throws her shoulder out, so Ty Lee settles for sitting quietly beside her.

Despite herself, Azula finds it comforting.

She can hear Ty Lee’s soft breaths, her presence. It settles something in her, smooths it and holds tight. She can’t bring herself to look up – the vulnerability in it might just crack her in half. So, she leans to the side and doesn’t miss the tension in Ty Lee’s body when she rests her forehead on her shoulder. Her instincts scream at her to _stop it, weak, weak,_ but her body’s too exhausted to move. She lets herself relax, limbs leaden, the gentle pressure on her temple soothing her throbbing head.

“I’m happy to see you Azula. I’ve missed you.”

“No, you’re not,” Azula says, and presses her forehead hard enough into Ty Lee’s shoulder to hurt.

Ty Lee’s voice is thick, and Azula knows she is crying without having to look. “I still missed you anyway.”

Azula thinks she hears her heart crack right there. She lets herself sink into the feeling. Someone cared enough to miss her. She tries to thrust the thought away violently – it doesn’t matter if Ty Lee cares. Azula doesn’t.

_Yes, you do._

They sit like that for a minute or a day. Time passes so slowly that it seems suspended, and all Azula can hear are her own rough breaths and the soft _clink_ of her manacles shifting ever so slightly. They sit long enough that she can feel her limbs turn to stone, and the thought is almost comforting. Let it all stop. Let the pain stop. Let her arms turn to marble, heart to quartz, until she’s as cold and as unfeeling as the stone of the palace itself.

_You would betray Father? You would let him rot? You would desert the Nation?_

She jerks away from Ty Lee the moment the door opens. Zuko stands silhouetted in the frame. He casts his eye across the room – small, plain, likely a storeroom – the two guards by the door, one twitching on the floor and the other trying very hard to shrink into the corner. The unconscious one is likely Ty Lee’s handiwork. She sees Zuko put it together in his head, frowning at the chains and the filthy hood. His gaze is furious as he whirls towards the guard, who’s desperately trying to be anywhere else but here.

“Did I not request the Princess was to be bought to the Palace with the dignity?” he snaps. His fists tremble with restrained anger, but his tone is level. “Well?”

“Yes, Fire Lord.”

“Pick him,” Zuko stabs a finger at the man on the ground, “up and leave. Now.”

The guard staggers forward and hauls the man out of the room. Zuko runs a hand through his hair in exasperation. He looks tired, but the bags under his eyes are smaller. Azula watches him warily as he kneels in front of her, and his voice is surprisingly gentle. “I’m sorry. A lot of the guards here hated the Royal Family. Looking for a chance to take there anger out on someone for the way we've treated them.”

She opens her mouth to snap at him, but Zuko – _Zuko –_ rolls his eyes at her. “I know, I know. You don’t need my pity.”

The shock of being read so predicably by Zuko of all people leaves her floundering, so she sits in dumbstruck silence. Ty Lee sits patiently, and they both stare at her, waiting. She can see herself reflected in Zuko’s pupil and grits her teeth. Shocking no one, she looks terrible. Looking at herself, she couldn’t respect the person in the reflection as a threat. Threats don’t have dried spit smeared across their cheeks and blotchy faces.

“I did try and stab him with a melted chain link,” she says. She thinks she sees Zuko’s mouth twitch upward, but it must be her imagination. “When he was guarding me. In my _cell_.”

“Really, Azula?” sighs Ty Lee.

“I’m going to melt these chains off you Azula, and let you search that room. But I need to trust that you won’t escape or hurt anyone. I’ve asked Ty Lee to be here and block your bending. Temporarily! I want – you’ll still be able to move freely,” Zuko pleads. Ty Lee nods along, unreadable, Azula’s heart seizing at the thought.

_Falling onto the cold hard metal, Ty Lee’s face above her, arms so heavy they’re waterlogged, Ty Lee’s and Mai’s cold glares as they are led away, the bitter taste of betrayal coating her tongue. Powerless. Stupidly powerless._

“And if I don’t let you?”

“Then you’ll have to do it chained and gagged,” Zuko says. There’s no animosity in his words – he doesn’t take any pleasure in it.

_Play along. Until it’s safe._

Azula nods. Her hands shake enough that her chains rattle, but she levels her gaze and draws her shoulders back. Ty Lee steps forwards. Something hardens in the air between them, and she can feel the memory of the Boiling Rock weighing heavy. Ty Lee isn’t gentle as she pokes and prods at her body. It’s just as unsettling as before, her limbs heavy and slow, like they lag behind her will. She breathes out and there’s no heat on her breath. There’s no heat anywhere. Like a candle that’s been extinguished.

“She’s safe.”

_Like a feral animal, aren’t you?_

“Hold still,” Zuko says as he wraps a hand around the chain link on the floor, the other close to her wrist. He closes his eyes and the metal glows under his palm, hot enough that the heat distorts and twists the air. Satisfied, he lets it cool, repeats the process on the other hand and with a hard kick of his foot, snaps the chains clean in half. It hits the floor. Her hands still have the manacles – _clever Zuko. Dead giveaway if I escape –_ but the ability to move unencumbered makes her feel weightless. She revels in standing, in walking, without the constant tugging on her forearms, a reminder of just how far she had fallen, locked in chains like a common criminal. She realizes she’s grinning – really, truly grinning, not a smirk, not a court smile with too many teeth. Zuko’s gaze is reserved – _when is it not –_ but she thinks he almost looks happy, so Azula scowls at him, and he dips his head like a kid caught stealing. He claps his hands and a servant appears at the door with a basin, clothes and a washcloth. Zuko thanks her – the Fire Lord thanks a _servant_ – and gestures at them. “New clothes if you want to wash up. But Ty Lee’s agreed to watch you though. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

_When was the last time you washed? You must be filthy. What would Mother think?_

Azula takes one look at the mold growing on the edges of her clothes and nods. It's not much. Its nothing really. The sort of half-hearted gesture Zuko would think of. The chance to feel clean again though is too tempting. Zuko leaves, and Ty Lee stands silently in the corner. Stewing quietly. Fearful of her, maybe.

_She wasn’t afraid of you. Neither was Mai._

“Say it, Ty Lee. Whatever it is you want to.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you Azula. I’m done with your negativity,” Ty Lee retorts. Whatever sympathy she’d shown before had evaporated and Azula can feel her heart drop at the thought. “Just get dressed.”

“Oh save it, Ty Lee. Yell at me. Insult me. Just don’t pretend your above it,” she snaps. She pulls her filthy shirt over her head. Her stomach is hollow and ribs just a little bit too prominent to be comfortable. Azula rolls her eyes at Ty Lee’s wince. “You left me to rot in that cell for weeks. Your regretful now?”

“Like you did to me and Mai?” Ty Lee flinches, but she stares at her with the intensity of a firehawk.

_She wants an apology. Remorse. Something. Anything to show you cared._

“Like a traitor deserves?” she spits. She ignores the twinge in her heart at Ty Lee’s expression – like a puppy being kicked – but feels her temper flare as Ty Lee shakes her head in disappointment. Like she’s some stupid child that misbehaved.

_Like Mother’s face when you burnt your dolls._

“Agni, what!? Don’t look down on me Ty Lee,” Azula steps forward, blood boiling, but there’s no heat to accompany it. She narrows her eyes and fills her voice with enough venom that it bubbles over her lips with glee. “Circus freak.”

Ty Lee doesn’t _do_ anything. Her face is stony, eyes like slate, and there’s nothing for Azula to latch onto. She has the sinking realisation that her words are as effective as throwing a bucket of water against a wall.

“Grow _up_ Azula,” Ty Lee stabs a finger towards her chest, and Azula shrinks. “Or don’t. I don’t care anymore. But you don’t control me, or Mai, or anyone anymore, even if you still after all this _time_ , keep deluding yourself that you do.”

Azula shivers like a wet dog, and she dresses in silence. She can feel the shame thick and oily on her throat. Ty Lee can’t even bring herself to look at her, knocking politely on the door to let Zuko in. He raises an eyebrow at the tension in the room. Azula can’t see him really, her eyes sliding over and over again, the information failing to register. She tries to catch Ty Lee’s eyes – to do what she doesn’t know. Scream at her until she can see the fear in her eyes again.

_Fall at her feet and beg for forgiveness?_

She can feel Zuko tugging at her elbow, and his face swims through the haze to consciousness. He guides her gently out of the room, grip tight on her elbow. He doesn’t leave her side. He just nudges her gently out of servant’s paths, and she almost wants to slap him for it, to do anything to distract herself from Ty Lee’s presence trailing silently behind.

_Always light on her feet. Like an Airbender. You admire that about her._

She won’t cry. She won’t. She forces herself to blink, take steadying breaths as Father taught her to. She ties the feelings to a stone, submerges it until it sinks into the silt and mud, settling alongside Mother. She forces herself to look up. Assess the surroundings. Identify key points. Exit and entryways. 

_Control yourself Azula, or I will._

The hallway is empty, except for the odd servant or dignitary. Zuko nods to them as they pass by, and she almost gags when he bows to an Earth Kingdom peasant. The contradiction of Fire Nation regalia interwoven with Earth Kingdom pottery and Water Tribe tapestries throughout the hallway makes her pause. Zuko, in his infinite wisdom, must have redecorated.

_You’ll burn it down with Father and restore the Palace. The Nation. All of it. Right?_

She can’t help but marvel at the craftsmanship, though. There’s no value in it – but it would be stupid to sneer at something so well made.

_But put the materials to better use. Pottery for jars of fire. The cloth for uniforms._

They walk down hall after hall, until they’re standing in the portraiture chamber. The tapestries tower above them, the material thick and rich, stern forefathers glaring downward with palms of outstretched fire. Father’s face gazes blankly at them, her gut twists from guilt, but Zuko still flinches when he looks at it. He pulls it aside roughly and shrugs when she scowls at him. Behind is a panel, sunken with the image of a flame, wick extending outward to light it. Zuko breathes in and summons a small flame, holding it close. The image blazes gold, the stone groaning as it folds inward, dust shaking loose.

_She’s a child with chubby hands as she holds them to the wick, concentrating with all her might, walking down the tunnel as the door slammed shut behind her. She’s ten and runs crying to the room after a scolding by Mother, her fire burning hot enough to scorch the stone. She’s twelve, Zuko’s been banished, and she spends hours pouring over scrolls for even a hint of the Avatar._

“How’d you even find this place Azula?” Ty Lee murmurs. A short tunnel extends into the wall before it widens into an empty black maw that creaks and groans ominously.

“Exploring.”

Their footsteps are silent. Zuko’s flame lets the shadows dance and leap for joy on the walls, everything coated in a fine layer of dust. The journey to the end feels like a thousand miles, but they stand together at the exit. Ahead is the chamber, a squat room sunk into the building’s foundations. A desk in the middle, faded rugs, braziers with candles that had long since burnt down to stubs, and scrolls. From floor to ceiling, perched on shelves that groaned with their weight. Scattered on the floor, piled in teetering towers.

It feels like a graveyard. A place for dead things, dead secrets, dead information that was too private for storing in the public records. Father’s and his forefather’s secrets, their secret shame and failings. Zuko shivers next to her, Ty Lee rubs her hands together, and even Azula feels unnerved.

_Your trespassing on fallow ground._

“Let's just get this over with. Please. This place’s aura is giving me the creeps,” Ty Lee says, and her voice shakes ever so slightly.

Zuko nods. He turns to her and gestures at the stacks. “Go ahead Azula. You know the deal.”

“You don’t have to remind me Zuko. I’m fully aware of the consequences, unfortunately.” She picks her way through the paper on the floor. Judging by the dust, not a soul has entered in years. She hopes – no, she knows – the scroll is still there when she discovered it all those years ago. Her nerves are shot, grinding together hard enough to make her feel physically ill.

_I won’t go back. I won’t. I would rather anything._

It will be there. Father and she were the only ones who knew this room existed.

_You risked your life on a gamble and lost. Pathetic, Azula._

She’s at the desk. She can feel the past, hot and heavy around her, see her chubby fingers reaching underneath, and discovering the switch for the false bottom. She can feel the dry parchment between her fingers, tracing her Mother’s name signed on the bottom, realising much, much later, what the contents of the letter truly meant. Azula feels underneath the desk. There is an awful, gut rending moment where she can’t find the switch, and Azula feels her whole world start to collapse until it clicks with a satisfying _pop_ underneath her fingers and she holds the scroll in her hands.

She forces herself to exhale before she hands it back to Zuko. Schools her face into a perfect mask of neutrality. He eyes it suspiciously, before unrolling it.

Zuko’s world expands.

He laughs. He grins wide. He re-reads it and nearly explodes on the spot. Zuko, whose as moody as a thunderstorm, is almost dancing for joy, clutching the paper hard enough to scrunch it. He holds it tight to his chest like a lifeline, and his voice is thick when he speaks.

“Mother – she had a life before him Azula. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

She gives him a tight nod. Azula can’t meet his eyes. She can’t do anything but stare at her feet and remind herself that he’s a traitor, his joy is pointless, that Mother doesn’t matter, that the _only_ thing that does is restoring Father to the throne, herself to his side.

_Even your words sound hollow to yourself._

“We’re going to Hira’a.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, so this was a really, really fun chapter to write. I'm loving this series so far and I'm pretty proud of this chapter. thanks for all your lovely comments, and any feedback ( please don't be shy to give it, especially if you think a character is behaving OOC) is much appreciated. 
> 
> also, Zuko being a supportive brother? we love to see it.


	5. sweet things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> damn, thats gay.

Azula always hated her hair.

She knew the value in it. In presentation. Style. Flair. Dramatics. To make yourself big enough, loud enough, scary enough that people cowered when you entered the room. Father had excelled at it – his anger was so hot that even a glance was enough to send servants scurrying and generals hardened by years of war to clutch their maps ever so slightly tighter. He was loud and obvious with it. She’d loved it when he’d banished a man with only a flick of his head towards the door. Wherever he went, the room grew tense and hot and stifling.

_Power. That’s power._

Her mother had loved her hair. She’d played with it, styled it, ran her fingers through her scalp, and cooed over it. She’d pull it into top knots so tight it made Azula’s eyes sting with tears, but she’d learned to bear it. Taking it out was a fierce scolding. She’d learned all of it – the makeup and the rouge. She’d applied it again and again until she could do it in her sleep. She’d slapped it on her skin like armour, another layer of fear, of distance.

_You’ve always had such beautiful hair._

It was lying at her feet now. Dusting her shoulders like powder. She could feel her mother’s disapproval – always felt it – but could almost picture Mother standing there, shaking her head with a slight frown, lest it mar her elegance.

_What is wrong with that child?_

That child is standing at a mirror in a bedroom. She’d hacked away at what was left of it, matted after the prison. It clung to her head in spikes and flat patches. Her skin is raw and chapped, lips cracked and pealing. She feels the urge to cover it – the weakness is so obvious, but Azula doesn’t know where her powders are.

Her room is too small.

The memories are too bright. She can’t turn, can’t think, without some ghost appearing in the hallway. Zuko had escorted her here after the letter, gestured at the bed. He’d thanked her profusely the entire time, whatever animosity he had for her momentarily eclipsed by his sheer joy. She felt like slapping him. Wants to grab him by the shoulders and scream – _what do you think I’m trying to do Zuko, are you really that dense, are you really that desperate, why can’t you see that I don’t care Zuko, I don’t, I swear I don’t._

The bed cover is dusty.

Suddenly, it is too much. Her head pounds and pounds, her grip on her temper unmooring. The wood walls and plush carpets aren’t homely – they’re too bright on the eyes, the paneling cold, gloomy. She forces herself to think and reign in her temper like a stubborn dog.

_There are guards on the door – Zuko’s not that stupid. The whole Palace is probably surrounded. You can’t escape. He’d place someone to watch you on every corridor._

She lets her gaze slide across the room.

_Perfect._

She flings open her shutters and stares down at the ground. The wall is sheer, a good twenty feet between her and the bottom. It descends into the dark, out into the courtyard sprinkled with lanterns. Stands for a second in the silhouette of the window and sways in time with the wind.

Her thighs shake on the fifth step down. She digs her fingers tighter into the slivers of the cracks in the walls, dusty white chalk coating them. She tries to force herself down through sheer willpower, but the weeks or days or months in the prison had left her muscles strained. Sensing the panic in her gut, Azula leans her head against the cool stone and feels the urge to laugh at her own predicament.

_Stuck like a fly on the wall._

She lets go.

For a weightless, breathless second her weight tips back and she’s falling into nothing, into the cool quiet night and she thinks that if she just kept falling she’d pass right through the ground, sink into the cool dark earth without a sound.

_The Sun still blazes when it sinks over the horizon._

She forces a red-hot jet of flame out of her feet that slows the fall that she hits the ground hard enough to be winded, but not enough to break a bone. She lands flat in a flowerbed and lies there, groaning, for a few seconds, clutching her ribs to her chest.

_Worth all of that, Azula?_

A stranger sees a girl laughing to herself in a flowerbed.

She picks herself up from the dirt. Pats herself. She’s standing in the gardens, one of the many that spiral amongst the Palace. It’s warm, with the soft twinkling of the lamps lighting the gravel paths and the sweet smell of jasmine on the breeze.

_The pool. Turtleducks._

In the gloom, it takes a second to realise where she is. The memory comes back slowly. Zuko and Ty Lee and Mai, the apple on her head and Zuko’s bright red face in the fountain. She feels her feet move before she’s conscious of it – winding her way down the path towards the pool, the apple trees heavy and sickly with fruit. The memory comes alive around her, sees her younger self on the grass, cartwheeling with Ty Lee, their giggles drifting in the breeze.

_Pushing her. Laughing at her in the dirt. She dared upstage you – the traitor thought she was better than you, even then._

She tries to pinpoint the feeling in her gut – happiness, remorse, guilt, longing – but it slips away before she can name it. Azula lets herself wander and breathe in the cool air, stretch her muscles that cramp and ache. She feels something close to calm then, or as close as she can get to it. Will let herself, with the rage and the guilt and the hurt still thick in her stomach.

Ty Lee is at the fountain.

Azula stands still. Half hidden by the gloom and a tree. Ty Lee is sitting on the fountain, knees drawn up to her chest, shadowed and still – remote and untouchable. She looks like a little kid.

_She looks weary._

Ty Lee’s staring at something in the water, idly trailing her hand back and forth. It sends ripples outward. The turtleducks aren’t there.

_Long dead._

The scent of apples is too thick, and it shoves its way up her nose and makes her head spin.

_Monster in the dark. Go on. Leer at her. Bare your teeth a little – be as cruel as you want. You know she deserves it. You know you’re better than her. The little traitor had no right to speak to you like that._

“I know your there Azula.”

_Shit._

She considers her options. Retreat? Feeble. Confront her? Risks looking like she’s attempting to escape. She doesn’t have a chance to consider it – Ty Lee swings herself round and stares pointedly at the tree she’s cowering behind. Azula swallows her pride and sidles out from behind it, holding her head high enough that maybe she’ll retain some of her dignity. Some of the power.

“What are you doing out here, Azula?” Ty Lee asks. Her eyes are narrowed in suspicion, but she doesn’t look like she’s going to attack. If anything, she looks exhausted. It makes Azula unsettled – for her entire life, Ty Lee seemed to have boundless reserves of energy. “The truth, as well.”

“Gardening. Admiring the scenery,” she says. Airily, she waves her hands at the trees around them. “You know, I’ve never truly admired how beautiful the gardens are.”

“Why do you have dirt in your hair?”

“What?”

Ty Lee points at her head. Azula almost rips her scalp off her head right there and then. Ty Lee’s tone is similar to before, and she still doesn’t know how to react to it. Frank. Rude. Blunt.

_She’s never dared. You need to remind her. All of them._

“I’m sensing that your very embarrassed right now,” Ty Lee says. She _smirks._ Ty Lee smirks at her and turns back to the pool without a care in the world. “Your aura’s very pink.”

“Watch how you speak to me Ty Lee,” she snaps. She wants to twist Ty Lee’s neck around her head.

Ty Lee’s voice is bored, “What, Azula? What are you going to do to me? Nothing.”

“Pray tell then,” and Azula says it through gritted teeth, “why _you're_ out here, Ty Lee? Why haven’t you called for the guards? I could be trying to escape.”

“Trying to clear my mind. Besides, you couldn’t hurt a turtleduck at the moment.”

_Excuse me?_

“You still haven’t told me why you’re out here Azula.”

“I was just leaving,” she spits. She wants to storm off, but she’s rooted in place, “I wanted to get out of that room. That’s all.”

Ty Lee shifts, ever so slightly. Azula takes a step forward, closer now, close enough to see how messy Ty Lee’s braid is, the strands falling into her face and shadowing her eyes. Ty Lee’s voice is gentle. “Why?”

“You’ve made it very clear you don’t care about me, Ty Lee. Stop with the fake pity. It’s embarrassing.”

“Why, Azula?”

Azula watches her. She’s screaming at herself to leave, but Ty Lee’s not quite looking at her earnestly – not like how she used to, with her wide eyes and compliments that Azula knows now that was nothing but empty praise – but with a sort of reserved hope, a crooked tilt to her mouth. Despite everything, it makes Azula wants to tell the truth.

_Don’t._

“It’s too much,” she says, and the words come out smaller than she meant to, like a scared little girl, “I can’t stop myself from remembering it. All of it.”

_I’m terrified Ty Lee. I don’t know myself anymore – I’m not sure I ever did. I know what I must do – but I can’t stop the dread pooling in my stomach when I think of it. I’m weak, I’m unsure and I’m everything Father hated._

“I know how you feel,” Ty Lee murmurs. Hugs her knees closer to her chest. “I hate it here. I want to go back to Kyoshi Island.”

“Why don’t you? Why – why are you helping Zuko?”

_Why are you helping me? You hate me – but you let me stay. I can’t understand it Ty Lee. What do you want from me?_

Ty Lee pauses. Cautiously, carefully, she scoots backward and pats the stone in front of her. It takes a second for Azula to catch up to the meaning. She scoffs and shakes her head and folds her arms but sits cross-legged on the stone anyway. She can see the bags under Ty Lee’s eyes. They're puffy and red as she peers at her from over her kneecaps.

“Do you know what’s my favourite thing about Kyoshi Island?

“No. How would I?” she says. It’s a monumental effort not to roll her eyes – but she doesn’t want to be sent back into the garden, doesn’t want Ty Lee to be mad at her again, to have her gaze at her with utter blankness.

“I always have something to do.”

The response catches her off guard. She’d been expecting something stupid. Inconsequential.

_She always managed to surprise you, somehow._

Ty Lee grins to herself in the crook of her knees.

“There’s _always_ something to do. Train. Fight. Garden. Make the powders for our makeup. We even take turns guarding the island after Zuko’s attempted invasion thing. I finally have a purpose that doesn’t revolve around you, or Mai, or my family. I’m just me. And its so peaceful,” Ty Lee whispers. She gazes into the pool and Azula can’t reach her. Ty Lee might as well be on another continent, “I know Zuko has a purpose now. You just don’t, Azula.”

“So what, you’re my spiritual advisor now? You’re going to guide me to some inner peace? I _know_ my purpose Ty Lee – I know my destiny. I have every right to it,” Azula snaps. She goes to stand up, simmering with rage but feels a gentle hand wrap around her wrist. Ty Lee smiles at her. A genuine, small smile that brings out the dimples in her cheeks and Azula curses herself for her weakness and ignores it at the same time. “Let go of me. Now.”

“Wouldn’t peace be nice?”

“I don’t _get_ peace, Ty Lee.”

Ty Lee shakes her head, and tugs Azula’s wrists, “No. You make it.”

_Was it ever really your destiny? Or was it Father’s?_

Azula rips her hand free and storms off into the garden. She buries the traitorous thought and the memory of Ty Lee’s smile amongst the apple trees and the jasmine. She places it underneath the soil and kicks dirt over it, until it sits deep, deep down, until its only company is rotting apple cores and half-dead things. She scrapes half the skin off her palms climbing back up through the window and almost vomits when she lies down in her dusty bed.

The Palace creaks in time to her breath, what’s left of her hair scatters itself on the floor and Azula doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> very sorry for the wait between chapters! life has absolutely roundhouse kicked me into oblivion so finding time to write has been difficult, but it's here! i like some parts of the chap, some parts feel sloppy to me, but its okay overall. thanks for all comments + kudos and any feedback is so, so helpful. 
> 
> follow up chap soon - written most of it!


	6. the start of something new

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> here we go!

The tar was sloughing off the rooftops in great, long drips. The heat was hot enough to make her sweat rivers down her back and blink it from her eyelids. It was a physical presence, beating on her brow, her hands, the spaces between her fingers.

_An omen for your mission._

Zuko stood next to her. He was silent, except for the tapping of his right foot. In the courtyard, it was as loud as a firework. He stared at the sky hard enough that perhaps he was summoning his friends through sheer force of will.

On his left, Mai.

They hadn’t spoken. She clutched his hand and stared ahead, careful always to skip her eyes over Azula. Her face gave nothing. They’d spoken in low, feverish tones when she’d stepped into the morning light, Mai’s eyes blowing wide. She was dressed in a rich, red dress, her hair slicked back from her face. Azula could feel the anger under the surface of Mai, bubbling away beneath her flat gaze. She’d just tilted her head and smirked. Let her stew.

_Traitor._

They stood together, but apart in the morning light. An empty courtyard. Carefully planned, she imagined, to avoid panic. Lest the Fire Lord abandon his nation. Purposefully, he’d kept her in the dark to the circumstances around this mission.

She dug her hand harder into her strap. Slung low around her hips was her bag. Spare clothes. Foodstuffs. No weapons. No maps. She was dressed in comfortable dark pants, pointed boots tailored with gold. An open red shirt, a golden sash around her waist. Pristine, perfect, and comfortable.

_Easy to run in. Easy to escape in._

They stood longer. The shadows crept up the stone wall, and she could tell Zuko was growing nervous. Mai squeezed his shoulder. A small, tight smile. For Mai, it was a loving grin. The wait is unbearable, but discipline always came easy to her. She draws a breath between her teeth and studies the columns that surround them. Beneath the curling vines is a golden dragon, their snarling jaws devouring each other. Behind that, lacquered wood and a dark, cavernous hall. Behind that – Ty Lee.

She sprints across the courtyard. Zuko smiles, and in a second she’s throwing her arms around Mai’s neck, the force of the impact sending Mai staggering backward. Mai coughs awkwardly, and slowly, her arms come up. They don’t quite touch Ty Lee’s back, the fingertips pressed ever so gently against her shoulder blades. Ty Lee squeaks something and Mai groans back, voice forever deadpan. “You have five seconds to get off me Ty Lee.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t love me, Mai,” Ty Lee says, stepping back. She cups Mai’s hands and grins so wide. Azula’s stomach twists and she stares at the dirt between the tiles. “It’s so good to see you.”

Mai shrugs. She squeezes Ty Lee’s hands. “It’s only okay.”

“Really?”

Zuko laughs. He bows to Ty Lee and lets out an _oof_ when she ignores that and gives him a tight hug. “She’s been waiting all morning to see you. Ignore her.”

“I’m an early riser,” Mai says, rolling her eyes. She tilts her head, and Azula can feel Ty Lee’s gaze on her. She lifts her head and gives nothing. Ty Lee’s hair is coming loose from her braid, strands of it falling against her cheeks. Even now, even with the heavy silence, Ty Lee gives her a small, unsure smile. Azula bites her cheek.

_Be cold. Be hard. You're soft. You don’t have time for this._

Mai’s gaze is boring a hole in the back of Azula’s neck, but she won’t give her the satisfaction of acknowledgment. They talk in low hurried voices, Mai’s voice slipping out of deadpan, “You can’t trust her! You can’t!”

“I’m not. This is the fastest way to get back to Kyoshi Island,” Ty Lee shrugs. Undisturbed, she gives Mai’s shoulder a squeeze. “Mai, please. You don’t have to worry about me.”

There’s something thick in Mai’s voice. “I’m not. I’m worried about her. Please. You don’t have to do this anymore. We don’t have to.”

Zuko glances anxiously between them. It’s unsettling for Mai to speak like that, to shake slightly, to pick at her nails and finger her knives with too much force. For once, it wipes the grin off Ty Lee’s face, and she nods. “I know. But I want to. She isn’t forcing me to do this. Neither is Zuko. You always said I needed to stand up for myself Mai.”

“Not like this,” she sniffles. With a sigh, Mai slips the mask back into place. She gives Ty Lee a clipped nod. “But if you must.”

_They hadn’t even looked at her._

It satisfying to hear the fear in Mai’s voice. Even after her ‘stand’ at the Boiling Rock. Azula tucks the knowledge away, adding to the teetering pile of her understanding of Mai.

_Be honest. It soothes your ego._

Now, Mai is openly seething at her. Azula picks at her nails and yawns, shifting slightly so the morning sunlight hits her in the eyes. She hears Ty Lee sigh in frustration, but at this point, she couldn’t care less. The sun is soothing on her bones, heating her blood. She can feel her fire stretch in response, and she breathes deep. Next to her, Zuko does the same, and Azula shields her eyes.

High, high above, there’s a blot. The blot comes closer. Grows legs. Grows a shaggy coat of fur, until the great, slobbering beast lands with a _thump_ in the middle of the courtyard, blowing dust. There’s a shout from the saddle and the Avatar vaults over it. He sprints across the yard and envelops Zuko in another bone-crushing hug. Behind him, his gang clambers down from the saddle and approach slowly. Zuko awkwardly slings an arm around the Avatar’s shoulder and gives it a squeeze. The Water Tribe Peasant – Katara, she assumes –, her brother and the blind girl. The Avatar talking so fast that it’s barely understandable, stepping back and looking Zuko up and down. The group saunters up. Katara gives Zuko a brief squeeze, the brother slaps his shoulder and the blind one punches him hard enough in the arm to leave a bruise. It’s a cacophony of greetings as they chatter excitedly, Zuko forgetting whatever limited decorum he possessed. They give Ty Lee and Mai tight nods, and the Avatar bows deep enough to them that his forehead nearly scrapes the ground.

It’s an awkward realisation that not a single one has bothered to notice her presence.

She leers in the background like the monster in the dark. She sharpens her smile and checks that every thread is in place for the performance. It’s Katara that catches her. Her eyes drag across the scenery, then stutter over her. She tugs her brother’s arm, and eventually, the conversations die down. They stare with expressions of mortified horror. Before Zuko can open his clumsy mouth, the brother reaches for his boomerang and points it at her. “What is _she_ doing here? Why isn’t she in prison?”

Zuko steps in front of her. “She’s helping us find my mother as I told you in my letters. She gave me a letter that might help us find her. Azula wants to change.’

“Change?!” Katara scoffs. Her hand hovers over the satchel at her side. “Zuko, you're being ridiculous.”

“I want her to come with us. She’s promised to be on her best behaviour. I understand that you don’t trust her – I just need you to trust me,” Zuko pleads. His gaze seeks each of them, and they duck their heads. Only the Avatar meets it, clutching his staff with a white-knuckled grip. There’s anger on his face, in the tightness of his brow, but muted curiosity. “Please. I understand this is hard. You don’t have to come. I would understand if you didn’t.”

“That’s an understatement,” Mai says. The words slip out of her mouth, and her eye twitches as their heads swing to stare. “What Zuko? It’s stupid. It’s _Azula_.”

“You all had faith in me that I could change. Even at my worst. Even when I made every wrong choice,” Zuko whispers, his voice cracking on the last syllable. He glances at her, steels himself. “Give her a chance. Katara – you saw her at the Agni Kai. Please.”

Katara blinks. Azula wants to kick the back of Zuko’s shins out, but she forces herself to keep still.

_How dare he shame you like that._

“I – this is different Zuko. She tried to kill you,” Katara mumbles. She hugs her arms tight across her chest, and her brother wraps an arm around her shoulder.

“I tried to kill you! Multiple times!”

“Guys, this isn’t helping,” the Avatar says. He holds up his palms and steps closer. His gaze is on her, and he approaches her slowly like she’s some sort of caged animal. He touches his back, and Azula forces herself not to smirk at the thought of the lightning hitting him, watching him squirm and flail in the air. She can see herself in the cell again, the thick, grimy walls, the weight of his voice. He glances between the two of them – Zuko with his arm flung out, his chest rising, falling, rising – and chews on the corner of his lip. “Are you serious about this Azula?”

_He’s scared of you._

It’s poison honey on her lips. “Yes.”

A great, belated sigh. He shrugs his shoulders, squares them. He gives a short nod to Zuko. For a second, she can see it all – the weight on his skinny, fragile shoulders, the aching pain in his bones, the grief still heavy – before it’s gone, and he’s all smiles again. “The monks taught me to forgive. If this is what you think is best Zuko.”

Zuko turns to Katara. She hugs her body tighter like if she squeezes it hard enough, she can control it all. She gives Zuko the tiniest nod, then turns away. The girl can’t even bear to stare at her – like’s she’s physically repulsed. Azula wants to claw her eyes out, rip out the Agni Kai, rip out the memory of her throat as it bubbled and blistered, and the frank, disgusting _pity_ in the girl’s gaze on that day. Her brother crosses his arms and spits _fine_ through gritted teeth. There’s no attempt to hide the hatred. It’s raw and bloody.

Zuko’s shaking like a leaf next to her.

The blind girl shrugs. “Sure. But if we all end up dead, then don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m not sleeping if she’s there.”

“ _If_ she sleeps,” the brother spits.

Zuko exhales. He retracts his arm slowly, knots his fingers. “Thank you. You don’t know how much this means to me. To us.”

There’s hurried goodbyes. Zuko hugs Mai tight, and cups her face in his hands. Azula pinches herself – Mai’s crying. Tears slipping through her cheeks, and she grips Zuko’s forearms like she can just keep him here if she holds tight enough. She whispers something in his ear, and he gives a grim nod. He turns to his friends, and gestures to the shaggy beast. They file towards it, and the morning sun slips into the day, the humidity an oven pressing them in, closer, closer, until Azula can barely breathe. Ty Lee stands next to her, and before Azula can react, she slips her hand into hers and gives it a tight squeeze, before bounding towards the beast. The group clambers on board, and she watches them. The bag is too tight across her chest. The future stretches boundless ahead of her, and she thinks of Father, alone in his cell.

_For the Nation. For him. For everything you’ve lost._

“Is this hideous beast even safe?”

“Azula, _please_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey hey, sorry for the slow updates everyone. good news - got next chap already written, just needs editing. will upload again soon!
> 
> hopefully, i got this right. busy w life and shit, and i wanted to nail the interactions between the gaang. feedback would be so appreciated here - if there out of character, etc. enjoy everyone, thanks for all the lovely comments + kudos. makes my day.


	7. growing pains

The Capital looked so small.

The Royal Palace was a smudge of a rooftop alongside slightly smaller smudges. It’s massive hexagon walls looked like matchsticks, and the lakes were minuscule bits of silver that glimmered like Mother’s necklaces. Azula’s entire purpose was as small and distant as a child’s toybox. The sensation of being so far above it makes her head spin, hands shake, so she slumps further into the saddle and tries not to vomit at the thought of the thousands of meters between her and the ground.

“Are you okay Azula?”

“Yes, Zuko. Obviously,” she snaps. Zuko, Sokka, Katara and Ty Lee are all staring at her. Very obviously staring, Katara doing little to hide her smirk. “I knew you had a death wish Zuko, but riding this shaggy beast is a bit too far.”

“Hey! Appa has feelings to Azula,” Aang says. She watches him pat the beast gently, his voice trying too hard to be soothing. “I know it’s scary, but Appa is super comfortable. I promise he won’t try and buck you off.”

“Maybe he should.”

“Katara!”

Azula narrows her eyes at the girl, but the peasant just raises an eyebrow. She can’t stop the immediate wave of disgust flowing through her at the sight of her – a hatred so thick it made her head pound. She can’t stop the fear either, the sensation of being entombed in ice so cold her hands shook for days afterward, the girl’s hands on her wrists as the chains were pulled tighter and tighter. “Maybe you should keep your mouth shut.”

“Don’t speak to her like that,” Sokka says. He points his stick at her in what she assumes is supposed to be a threatening gesture.

Zuko sighs. “Sokka, please.”

Azula grits her teeth. Her whole body is tense. Barely underway, and the group of them were scarcely restraining themselves from saying or doing something that would end up with one of them a smudge thousands of feet below. She can feel the undercurrent of something heavy. The past seems to hang suspended in the clouds, the stench of it flowing over them.

Still, there are clouds.

Azula didn’t realise how much she’d missed something as simple as sunlight. Fresh air that wasn’t stale and moldy. Her clothes are new and the grime has been scrubbed from underneath her fingernails. She feels clean. She feels like a threat again. Not the lunatic in the cell. Not Zuko’s crazy sister.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Ty Lee says. Azula nearly jumps out of her skin, but Ty Lee’s gaze is steady. “Freeing.”

“Freezing,” she growls. Ty Lee smirks, and Azula feels like she’s missed the joke. Katara chides Toph to keep her filthy feet off her bedroll and she watches Zuko smile at Toph’s fake gag. The sensation of being dependent on him, that only through his good graces can she leave the prison, leave the Palace, revolts her to the core.

They plummet in the air. The beast rights itself but leaves her stomach somewhere on the ground below. The rest of the group doesn’t even notice. They chat and laugh and gossip like they aren’t surrounded by anything on every side.

_Study them. You know what needs to be done – you can’t let a moment be wasted._

The Avatar’s voice cuts through her thoughts, and she realises that they’ve fallen silent. “Think we’ll find anything in Hira’a?”

“Honestly – I…I don’t know Aang. There’s got to be _something_ – she might’ve returned there after the banishment. Just knowing anything about her before Ozai is useful,” and Zuko flinches at the memory of Father, “My mother – Ursa – she wasn’t from a noble family or even a military one. This letter, this place, it’s nowhere. The closest significant thing is the Western Air Temple, but there’s no route between them. It’s so far from the Capital. Roku is connected to her, but I don’t know _how_.”

The words are out of her mouth before she can stop herself, “Fitting Mother was born in some backwater.”

They all stare at her. Sokka coughs and Zuko winces. For the first time in a long time, she feels _stupid_. “What!?”

“Nothing, Azula. Nothing,” Aang murmurs.

Apparently, that’s enough to set Zuko off. He frowns at her and lifts his good eyebrow. “Don’t speak about her like that Azula.”

“I can speak about her however I want, Zuko. She’s my mother as well as yours,” she snaps. “I know Mother’s a fool, but do you really think she’d be stupid enough to stay in a town Father knew of?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know!”

_I didn’t know it was possible to sound that pathetic._

“For Agni’s sake, no wonder you haven’t found her.”

For a second, Zuko looks like he’s about to punch her. The tension is so thick that Sokka reaches for his club and Katara for the pouch of water at her side. But Zuko breathes in, clenches and unclenches his fists. His voice is painfully calm. “The letter is addressed to her from someone who knew her before Father. It’s vague, but whoever wrote this suggests that there is always a home for her in Hira’a. It’s a hint. Your good,” he bites his tongue and forces out the word, “At finding people. You know that background information is important.”

“Yes, I am _exceptionally_ skilled at tracking. I just don’t think you’ll find anything in Hira’a.”

Toph smirks at her, and Azula resists the urge to wipe the grin off her face, “So then why come if you think it’s a doomed mission, Oh Master of Tracking?” 

“Because I want to find _my_ Mother, genius,” and as she says it, she puts on her brightest, widest smile, her perfectly practiced grin for Father, “I want to change.”

“This is so great. I just love the overwhelming sense of dread. So fun. Really glad I’m here,” Sokka quips and Azula just considers flinging herself over the edge of the saddle and taking her chance with the ground.

No one speaks for hours.

They fly onward in dead silence and dead air. The sun sinks further towards the horizon, painting the sky in brilliant strokes of purple, pinks and red, like the peaches in the Royal Gardens. The light plays on the clouds soaring far, far above, reflecting, refracting and shimmering like the Heavens has decided to put on a personal show just for them.

_You couldn’t see the sky from inside a cell. Neither can Father._

They fly and fly, until Aang points at some town in the distance. Its barely a town – more a collection of hovels carved out from the surrounding forest, a low mountain ridge in the distance. He suggests making camp for the evening. They drift down, Katara and Aang summoning a cloud that covers their approach, which leaves everything gratingly damp. The bison settles within walking distance of the town in a clearing of leafy pines and mossy ground that chatters with creatures. A trail wanders its way through the undergrowth, and there’s a remanent of a campfire in the centre of the clearing. They dismount, and it takes a second for Sokka and Toph to trade looks before making some vague statements about exploring the town.

She doesn’t miss the nod between Sokka and Katara, a murmur of ‘be safe’ and ‘watch her’.

Katara and Aang set about making camp, rolling tents, gathering wood and something twinges in her heart when Aang gently takes Katara’s hand and brings it to his mouth, kissing the tips of her fingers and making her giggle when he blows raspberries on her palm. She catches Ty Lee staring at the back of her head and glares at the dirt. Zuko is sitting quietly next to the bundle of firewood, twin swords strapped to his back, rolling the scroll between his fingers.

“What’s the great plan, Zuzu?”

His head snaps up. “What?”

“I _said_ genius, what’s the plan from here,” she says. She dawdles over and plops herself next to him, reclining in her palms. She keeps her tone light. “How many days to Kyoshi Island?”

“However long it takes.”

“Thank you, Zuzu. You’re just a well of conversation.”

Zuko rolls his eyes and picks at the corner of the map. His mouth quirks upward in a small smile, and she’s struck by a feeling of great dread. “It’ll take about two weeks. Then we’ll loop back to Hira’a. But, seriously, you can’t talk Azula.”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s right, you know,” Ty Lee murmurs. Katara and Aang pause, swapping looks. “You can be a bit intimidating.”

“Because I don’t _waste_ my time lowering myself to the standards of you,” she snaps. Her temper flares but its muted by her confusion at what exactly is happening. She feels like an exhibit in a traveling zoo.

Zuko grins, “Don’t or can’t?”

“Shut your mouth Zuko,” she hisses. It comes out as a strangled whisper, which just makes Zuko smile a little wider.

Katara cocks a hand on her hips, “What are you going to do about it Azula? Set him on fire?”

“Maybe you _filthy_ peasant,” she says, desperate to do anything, say anything, that wipes the smiles off their faces, because the fact that she’s the joke is wrong, wrong, wrong, and no one should dare. She clutches her sash and pulls it tight until it digs into her abdomen. The lack of control makes her head spin, and for a second, she can feel the grate underneath her fingertips, the tang of crackling ozone as the sky glowed blood red above. The memory leaves her reeling, until the clearing and Agni Kai merge and fall together, so she presses her palms to her forehead and scrapes her fingernails over her scalp.

Dead silence.

Aang’s voice is a gentle reprimand, but stern. “Azula. Please.”

She watches him grip his staff tighter. This tiny boy – his shoulders slight, his grin easy – is staring at her sternly. For a second, she almost laughs, because it’s Father’s gaze all over again, with disappointment and rebuke mixed together with equal measure.

_Was it supposed to be a joke?_

“I’m going for a walk,” Azula says. She sees Ty Lee standing up, but Zuko shakes his head.

He stands, tucking the scroll into his pants. “You know someone has to come with you, Azula.”

“You don’t trust me enough not to make a conspiracy with – with, what, the trees? A frog? I’ll plot your downfall in the middle of the woods?”

Katara’s eyes are hard like permafrost. “Yes.”

_Take control, Azula._

“Fine. If you must,” she snaps. Zuko gestures at the edge of the clearing to the path. Ty Lee gives her a small smile and a wave as they set off. They pick their way through the undergrowth. Rich, deep and dark, the smell of moss and green thick in their noses. Pines tower above, their roots weaving amongst the soil. Zuko watches the surroundings with curiosity, even stopping to examine a flower. He smiles, rolls the bud between his fingers, snipping the stem.

“It’s white jade,” he explains, gaze far away. “Uncle brews it sometimes. He gave himself a nasty rash when we were in the Earth Kingdom.”

She ducks underneath a branch and kicks a stick, the fat, doddering idiot bitter in her throat. “How is the old fool? Has he managed to choke to death on a tea leaf yet?”

“No Azula. He’s good, “Zuko sighs. He pockets the bud and pushes ahead of her. “He runs a tea shop in the Capital when he isn’t advising me and wants to expand his business into the Earth Kingdom. He wanted to speak to you but didn’t think it was the right time.”

“So, he’s running again?” she snaps. Of course, Uncle still avoids her. She’d never been anything but a stain on his shoe, a reminder of Ozai, a poor influence on his precious Zuko. His quivering fingers on hers on the deck of the Fire Nation ship, directing her lighting as easily as if she was a _child_.

_But what does he see in Zuko that he doesn’t see in you?_

“He doesn’t have the courage to face me.”

Zuko pauses. He stands, and his face draws inward, folding in on itself. “No. Maybe he doesn’t. But he regrets how he treated you Azula. He wants to make amends. Like I do.”

“For Agni’s sake Zuko, enough with the pity party.” She stalks past him, hitting his shoulder hard enough to send him staggering slightly. His fists tighten, but he follows. “Father treated us fairly. It’s not my fault that you couldn’t perform. It’s not _my_ fault that you decided that you would project every one of your desperate, needy insecurities onto me. You're pathetic. Don’t drag me down to your level.”

“And you don’t think that how Father treated us – that it was wrong? That it was cruel? He banished me Azula. He sent me on a pointless mission for _years_. He made you train and train and train until you were _exhausted_ ,” Zuko pleads. He grabs her elbow and forces herself to face him. His hideous scar makes his face a mockery, and she can _smell it, the burning flesh, the scream that went on, and on, and on, the grim satisfaction of watching Zuko sob on the Palace floor_. “We were kids Azula. I never wanted to hate you.”

“I do,” she snarls. His hand falls limply from her elbow, hanging at his side, his chest folding inward. He shakes his head slightly and grits his teeth like a snarling dog. Now the words spill out, and they come hot and fast and in between breaths. “Everything I ever said, everything I ever did, I chose to do it Zuko. You’re a pathetic, useless excuse for a son and Father was right to treat you like he did. You don’t deserve the crown. You took what was _mine_ and you never, ever seem to get it through your thick, stubborn head that you should’ve stayed gone.”

“Okay,” he says.

There’s ash on her mouth. It coats her tongue in thick, black tar.

“Okay, what?”

It’s crawling up her throat. It’s drowning her nostrils and squeezing tears out of her eyes.

“It’s _mine_ Zuko. It’s my destiny. It’s everything I am. “

She can’t breathe. She can’t think. The hatred for him is so thick she wants to throttle him. She wants to make a matching scar. She wants him to vanish. Wants everything to go back, before this living nightmare, when Father was right and everything was so simple.

_Was it ever?_

“You're more than the crown Azula. You’re my sister,” he whispers, and the stubborn idiot shakes his head. “I hate you. But you’re my sister. And it wasn’t your fault that we had Ozai for a Father. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

It’s a final, desperate stab in the dark, “Give me the crown then Zuko. Let Father out.”

“No,” he says, and she _knows_ it’s weak, but she swallows the disappointment. She turns and walks mutely down the path. Zuko sighs, a deep exhausted sound, rubs the bridge of his nose. “You know I can’t do that. You know that I need – the world needs the Fire Nation to be better. To do better. To heal. Azula, please. Just talk to me.”

She doesn’t say a word. She lets him stew, and regret, and Azula forces the ache in the back of her throat down. They walk down the path to the village, stand at the edge of the town. It can’t be more than twenty or so houses in the entire village, but there’s an anxious buzz in the air. Each tiny, hovel house, is roughly arranged in a U shape, surrounding a square of tightly packed earth. Stalls dot the space, their red canvas awning the only colour in a village that could at best be described as a magnificent array of dirt brown. Tiny puffs of dust turn into gold in the evening sun with the movement of so many feet, the rich smell of incense wafting in the air. Zuko stands close, chewing on his cheek. Immediately, several people turn and glare at them suspiciously.

“Something’s wrong.”

“Perceptive as always Zuko. How could you have possibly guessed? Maybe it’s the people glaring at us with murderous intent.”

Zuko scowls and folds his arms. He steps forward, but there’s a shout, movement. Out of the crowd is a flash of muted green and blue. Sokka and Toph, arms waving with a flier above their head. Sokka jogs up to them, claps Zuko on the shoulder, scowls at her. Toph plants herself on the ground.

“Fancy seeing you here. Right, so. We did a bit of scouting. Turns out,” he points at the flier, “A girl went missing today. It’s asking to contact the Mother if anyone has any information.” 

“Sokka found her house. Wasn’t one to find, as the villagers were very clear it’s basically derelict,” Toph deadpans. “He crept around the back.”

“ _I_ was doing _detective work_ Toph, and as you know, it’s vital to collect information. Which I did. We know where she lives.”

Zuko nods. Already, his gaze is serious. He grips the handle of his sword and taps it. “We should offer to help.”

“Sure. But that’s attention we don’t need,” Sokka says. He waves the flier, and his mouth twists. The setting sun casts his face in shadows. “I think we should stay on schedule. It’s too big a risk if anyone figures out who we are. Or even just suspects it.”

Azula knows Zuko’s made up his mind before he even opens it. Better to offer help and look remorseful. Better still if it gets out that the Fire Lord is missing from the capital. Excellent if the rumor starts to float that his insane sister is free. “I think we should at least try. That woman needs our help so badly.”

Sokka stabs the flier at her. “What are you trying to do Azula?”

“Stop it Sokka. We’re helping,” Zuko snaps, and his tone of voice leaves no room for argument. Toph shrugs and picks at her fingernails.

“If she’s coming, then we’re hurting.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everyone knows the drill. comments + kudos make my day, and thank you to everyone who takes the time do it. feedback, especially, criticism is valuable.
> 
> lets see what happens next thou, shall we?


	8. lost children

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the girls are fighting!

The tiny hut is on the furthest outskirts of the village.

Its paint is peeling in great, curling strips. The shutters clap loosely in the breeze. A sad, rusty chime hangs by the door, playing its mournful song. Its squat exterior is punctured by two gaping windows, surrounded by a low wooden veranda that creaks ominously when they step on it. Toph wrinkles her nose and pretends to gag. There’s a foul-smelling odour in the air, and Azula is tempted to cover her noes when she sees the stinking rabbit skins strung on a hanger in the yard.

_Agni, people live like this._

Zuko knocks on the door. No one answers. He knocks louder, but there’s still no response. They stand there for five minutes as Zuko keeps knocking until Toph shoves him out of the way and gives the door a solid kick. It swings open into a dusty, dank hallway. There’s a room off to the side, what looks like a closet, and a larger back area that’s just an empty cavern. Toph swaggers inside and they follow. Azula rolls her eyes when Zuko gently steadies the door on its decaying hinges. Sokka puts his hands on his hips and surveys the room. 

“Ominous.”

Toph cracks her knuckles. “This is a murder shack.”

“Can we please just focus on finding the woman? She needs our help,” Zuko says. He pushes to the front of the group and starts down the hall. With every step, the house seems to grow dimmer, closer, pressing inwards. Floorboards creak and sigh. 

“There’s the daughter’s room,” Sokka murmurs. He points at the cupboard, doors ajar. It’s a damp, dark crawlspace, with a thin mattress and a hodgepodge collection of old toys. Candlewax paints snail trails on the floor and an empty scabbard for a knife peaks out from underneath a pillow. Sokka picks up a tattered book and holds it close. His expression is livid. “Why is she living like this?”

“Guess we’ll just have to ask her,” and they jump as Toph’s voice cuts through their trance. Wordlessly, she points at the end of the passageway, where a single, pale hand is wrapped around the doorframe. Gradually, an arm, then a shoulder.

“Oh Agni,” Zuko whispers.

The woman is bent double to the floor. Her back, so twisted and hunched, rises like a mountain over her shoulder. Azula thinks of the monsters in Mother’s plays, hunchbacks and spirits with great, twisting malformities. From here, the woman’s features are unclear, but her robe trails along the ground, filthy and matted.

“Who are you?” the woman croaks. “What are you doing in my home?”

Sokka steps forward, holding his palms up. “We heard your daughter is missing. We wanted to offer our help.”

The woman recoils. “I said, who are you?”

“We’re just travellers passing through. This is Sparky, Flame – o and Boomerang. I’m Toph.”

The woman grips the wood tight enough to split it. Zuko elbows Toph in the ribs and approaches the snivelling creature. “I’m sorry – ignore her. We are just travellers passing through – we were fleeing the war. I’m Lee. This is my cousin Jun. And that’s Boomerang – he’s from the colonies, strange names and all that. That’s Toph.”

Sokka’s glare is murderous but the woman relaxes slightly, stepping forward from the gloom with short, stuttering steps. She can’t be older than forty, but her features are ancient. Eyes watery where tears had carved great, riven tracks through her cheeks. The grief to her features makes her face droop, and Azula’s reminded of a wet, bedraggled bird of prey, with a great hawkish nose and sharp eyebrows. Now, they can see her hands are gnarled sticks, bent and twisted with callouses and arthritis beyond her age. In a daze, the woman turns, beckons them to follow.

Sokka’s voice is hushed. “Are we sure this is a good idea?”

“Of course not, but you idiots are in too deep now,” Azula hisses and smirks when Sokka runs a hand down his face in frustration. “You’ve made your bed. Lie in it.”

Toph scoffs. “You’re in it too now Princess. We go down together, or we don’t go at all.”

Exasperated, Zuko frantically makes some wordless gesture that involves a lot of arm flapping towards the room at the end of the hall. They file down, and it’s just as empty and depressing as the rest of the hovel.

Except for the shrine.

A large, ornate shrine in the center of the wall. Azula must admit its gorgeous. Rich incense, flowers, and food. In the center of it all – a large, framed picture of a young man, with ropey black hair and a wide smile. It’s swaddled in cloth that would’ve been fit for Father, so rich she’s tempted to touch it. In the corner, there’s a spinning wheel and stool, cracked leather seat showing its wear. In the center of the room, a low table, where the woman sits. A set of screens presumably opens to a garden, but they're clamped shut. Wherever they sit, the man’s gaze fixes them, and the sweat on Azula’s back isn’t just from the heat.

Blearily, the woman gestures at Zuko. Her words are slow and forced through a pain tightened jaw. “My name is Kori. What do you want with my daughter?”

Azula rolls her eyes. The stupid woman doesn’t even care her daughter is missing. She resists the temptation to smirk at Zuko and keeps her voice soothing. “She’s missing. There are fliers all around town. We talked to a few locals on the way here – she hasn’t been seen for a day.”

Kori narrows her milky eyes. “What?”

“We mean no offence. We overheard people talking about it in the marketplace,” Zuko murmurs. “We have some experience of finding people from the war. We just wanted to offer our help. If you want it, of course.”

“Have you seen my son?”

Sokka’s voice is harsh. “No. Your daughter. We’re looking for your _daughter_.”

The woman flinches. Kori’s mouth opens, then closes. Her eyes strain and her voice is small, a distant, dusty relic of a past dusted off in an attic, “Do you know when he’s coming home? He said he would come home soon. He promised me.”

Zuko looks like he’s about to vomit. The silence is deafening, Kori scratching her fingernails back and forth over the wood. They glance at each other, and Toph sighs, voice frank. “We don’t know your son.”

“Then why are you here?” Now, Kori starts crying. She lifts a hand to her mouth and it shakes, the finger bones rattling against one another like sticks, panic creeping into her voice, “Where’s my daughter? Where is she? Did you take her? Did you? She was hunting yesterday – you took her. You took her. You took my son. Where is he?”

Now, Zuko staggers upright. He kneels in front of the old woman and cups her hands. There’s a lump in Azula’s throat and she’s not sure why as he bows low voice firm. “Your son has just been delayed coming home, but he’s safe. Your daughter will be too. I swear it on my honour.”

_The idiot sure knows how to be melodramatic._

“I need to weave. I need to keep weaving,” Kori gasps. Panic in her voice, but she squeezes Zuko’s hand tighter as the walls close in, the humidity wetter, the grief stronger. “Be safe, Ukano. Your sisters somewhere near the ridgeline above town hunting those rabbits. Before midnight, you understand. You understand?”

Zuko nods. He stands up and squeezes back, trying to extract his hands from the woman’s iron grip of sharp nails and blotted skin. The laughing man in the portrait grins down at them, and he seems to find the sick cruelty funny. 

_He’s dead or lost or a prisoner. He knew the risks._

“Go on Ukano and take your lovely friends with you. I need to work. I have to work,” Kori says. She turns her back and hums a mindless tune. They file out the way they came, and Azula looks back once. Kori’s eyes see nothing as she lovingly strokes the portrait of her son, as if she just wished hard enough, wanted enough, the man would throw open the shutters and announce his homecoming. 

Azula resists the temptation to scoff at the squalor, but the lump in her throat makes her choke. 

_Love for the son, none for the daughter._

They walk down the hall with its cobwebs and fungus, past the closet, into the bright, aching sunlight. They stand outside and overlook the rest of the village, at the path choked with weeds staggering back. Sokka kicks at the dirt and Zuko chews his lip. The thought of making the climb back down into the village, back to the bison, makes Azula’s calves ache.

_Before, you would’ve been able to sprint here without breaking a sweat._

“She was looking after that portrait of her son better than her daughter,” snaps Sokka, breaking the silence. He stares at the hovel, fists clenching, working his jaw back and forth. “How could she _do_ that?”

“Greif,” Zuko replies, and his mood is foul.

“It’s a sickness,” Toph says. She shrugs, but her voice is lacking its usual tactless bluntness. “Makes you forgetful.”

“Stupid old woman is worshipping a ghost,” Azula murmurs. They stare at the hovel for a moment longer, before Sokka turns. They pick their way wordlessly down the path. No one speaks when they reach the village, or when they clamber back through the hills to their camp, the sun low, gloom fast approaching. Disgust twists Azula’s gut at the weakness of Kori, but it’s tempered by the pettiness of it all. Ultimately, the woman is nothing. She’ll die alone, buried in the dusty soil of her overgrown yard, the son in foreign soil, and the daughter will follow. Forgotten. Unloved. Pointless.

_Like you?_

“Keep your eyes open for her,” Zuko says, pausing. The woods stretch above and below, and in the middle distance, there is smoke rising from their clearing. “We have to find her. Kori said the girl went hunting on the ridgeline past the village. I’ll ask Aang to fly over the forest, and the rest of us will take Appa. It’s too dark now to see properly, but we’ll again try in the morning.”

Sokka nods, tapping the side of his leg with his stick. Azula can see the gears, however slow, turning in his head. “Toph, when we get back to camp, could you figure out how to uproot some trees? We could load them up on Appa and set up beacons. Maybe she’ll be drawn to them if she’s lost.”

“Please, you might as well hang a sign around our necks saying, ‘we’re right here,” Azula says. Sokka raises his eyebrows high enough they disappear into his hairline. “We want to keep a low profile, correct? What are those quaint little villagers going to think when they see mysterious fires burning across their ridgeline?”

“It’s a risk we have to take,” Zuko says, unyielding. “It’s my duty as her sovereign to try in every way we can. Katara can explain what’s happening to the villagers if they're alarmed. She’s _good_ at talking to people.”

“Sovereign of bleeding hearts and stupid risks, perhaps.”

“ _Azula.”_

Now, she forces her words out through clenched teeth. “Your idea sounds fantastic, Sokka.”

“Why _thank you_ Azula. You’re so kind.”

With that, they struggle up the rest of the trail. They stagger into camp and drop to the earth as the Sun dips over the horizon, cool and dark as the stars begin their ascent. The rest of the group cluster around Sokka, who explains the plan with a fervent excitement. Katara’s practically combusting with self-righteous outrage, and Aang smiles at her fondly, gripping her hand and giving his agreement to the stupid mission. They eat a foul-tasting soup that Katara’s cooked up over the hot coals, oil and tangy and with some sort of meat that’s tougher than the leather on the bison’s saddle. After, the Avatar shoulders his glider to search the forest and wishes them luck, before taking a running leap and bending the winds into an updraft to carry him higher. Soon he’s a dot over the village in the valley, then nothing. 

When he’s gone, Sokka turns back to Toph. With a grin, she shakes her wrists, before facing one of the many pines that surround the glade. 

She bends low, feet heavy, and with a sharp exhale, shoves her wrist upward. 

The earth around its roots shiver, a great, creaking groan filling the air as its ripped out by the roots, pillars of earth rising upward to ease its fall to the ground. Toph does it again, until five great pines lay toppled, limbs shuddering, earth settling.

_Respectable bending._

Katara and Toph set about slicing the trunks into great, long strips, bending razor-thin edges of earth and water. Azula touches her head at the memory of how close one of those whip-thin streams of water had come to slicing her head off. They're left with tens of small, clean, stripped logs, which Toph bends pillars of earth around to lift them to Appa’s saddle. Zuko loads them on and lifts Toph. They tower above them and he promises to be back shortly, Appa unable to carry the weight of all of them. He stares pleadingly at Ty Lee, glancing between Katara and her, and she nods. With a ‘yip’, the beast thumps its tail and leaves Azula standing there with Katara on her right and Ty Lee on her left.

The atmosphere is cold, to say the least.

Katara paces back and forth, muttering about ‘that woman’, and ‘the hopeless villagers’ while glaring at _her_ for some reason, like Azula kidnapped the kid herself. Ty Lee wrings her hands and looks hopelessly between the two of them, like the earth between opposing armies. The chatter of the forest rises, like spectators jeering for blood, building to some inevitable crescendo.

_Might as well indulge myself._

“Will you please stop pacing? It’s giving me a headache trying to look at you.”

Katara snaps to attention, “Good.”

“Are you always this petty?”

“Around you, yes,” Katara snarks. “It’s an instinct. Can’t turn my back when you’ve got the knife in the other hand.”

Azula grins. The Water Tribe girls’ emotions run so hot; she could almost be mistaken for a firebender. It’s pathetically easy to tilt her head and pick her nails, to play disinterested. “I’m trying to change Katara. I don’t know what I can do to convince you of that.”

“You’ve fooled Zuko and Aang,” she hisses, and stalks closer, stabbing a finger at Azula’s chest. Azula just glares down at her, putting the few inches she has over Katara to use by lording over her. “But I know you won’t change. You have had _everything_ handed to you your entire life. Why would you give that up now?”

“Little Zuzu’s gotten to your head, hasn’t he?” Azula snaps. The insulation of it – the naked arrogance in assuming she hasn’t worked, hasn’t earnt every form, through years spent fighting and training and honing under Father. “I worked harder than him. I can’t be blamed for his pathetic failures.”

“Guys,” Ty Lee pleads. 

Katara snorts. “You don’t deserve anything. You’ve never worked a day in your life.”

“Because I haven’t spent my life in squalor pitching tents in the snow?” she smirks. Katara flinches, and Azula pushes. “You're pathetic. No wonder the Southern Water Tribe so easy to conquer. Even Zuko could have done it.”

“If he’s so pathetic, then why did he beat you at the Agni Kai?” yells Katara, and there is a glint in her eye as she steps forward, mouth twisted. Azula’s heart pounds. She squeezes her eyes shut and feels herself slipping back, grip on the present loosening, shadows deepening, and Katara’s voice is dripping with disdain, thick and syrupy. “Why did I?”

Azula shoves her. She hasn’t even registered her hands have moved until Katara staggers backward, furious. Katara pushes her back, palms against her shoulders.

Whatever leash Azula had on her temper snaps.

Azula just throws herself, no grace, no form, catching Katara around the midriff with both arms. They hit the ground, Katara with an _oof_ , as the wind is knocked out of her, lying momentarily stunned. Azula pins her with a leg either side of her waist, cocks an arm back for a punch, but Katara bucks, throwing her balance. Azula gets an elbow to the gut and she scrabbles in the dirt, bucked off, clutching her stomach when she stands.

_This disgusting, worthless tribe girl._

Katara reaches for her pouch and a whip of water slithers out, and Azula breathes deep, bending the fire until it glows at her knuckles and the whip is arching towards her head, Azula’s ducking –

Her arm’s dead. 

She registers a pink blur behind Katara before the girl staggers forward, collapsing onto one knee. Ty Lee stands between them, arms outstretched. Livid can’t describe the expression on her face, her eyebrows drawn so tight they’re one line. Her voice is a thundercrack.

“Are you two SERIOUS?”

Azula starts forward, about to rip Ty Lee’s pretty pink head off, but she holds up a finger. She curses herself when she stops dead in her tracks, but Ty Lee’s eyes are flint. “I can’t believe the two of you. Is it _that much_ to ask for us to just stand here and not try to kill each other?”

Azula wants to poke Katara’s eyes out when they both say,“Yes.”

“Fine! You know what, fine,” Ty Lee snaps, glaring at Katara, then her, “I thought you would at least try for Zuko’s sake, and Azula, for yourself, but not. We’re just going to stand here and not move until Zuko comes back then. Is that clear?”

The cicadas chatter in response.

“I didn’t hear a yes!”

_“I didn’t hear a yes,” Mother said. She glares at her, holding the half-charred doll in her hand. “Don’t ever disrespect someone’s gift like that, Azula. You know better! Understand?!”_

“Yes,” Azula mutters. Ty Lee’s gaze softens for a second, and she dips her head slightly. Glaring at Katara, Ty Lee lowers her arms and stalks over, pulling Katara’s elbow and whispering something into her ear. Azula forces herself to listen, but all she can catch are snippets - _you saw her – she’s trying okay, you don’t know what it was like in that Palace, you're better than this -_ before Katara huffs and tugs her arm away. Ty Lee raises an eyebrow and sighs, clearly disappointed. 

The rest of the wait is silent. They watch the village below. Beyond it, at the ridgeline, deep in the forest, three pinpricks glow one after another, luminescent in the darkness. 

_Idiotic brother was right. Least they are visible._

There’s a great rush of wind overhead, trees bending inward. In a blink, the bison thumps its massive tail and settles in the clearing. Zuko’s head pops over the saddle and he gives a timid wave, but it curdles when he senses the tension. Ty Lee gestures and they clamber up the side of the beast, Zuko hauling them over the saddle. Azula settles herself in the furthest corner from Katara and bends a minuscule flame, turning it over in her palm, hiding it between her knuckles. It forces herself to pause, to breathe, concentrating on keeping the flame manageable. Ty Lee just shakes her head when Zuko opens his mouth about their dishevelled appearance, and he sighs with an equal mix of frustration and disappointment. Angrily, he flicks the reins and they soar into the night, over the village, bathed in moonlight, to the ridgeline, the mountains in the distance. Earth turning stony and trees sparse. Zuko steers the creature to one of the fires, earth rushing up to meet them. Wordlessly, they land and he throws himself off the saddle, stomping towards where Sokka and Aang are clustered around the bonfire. The heat is intense, wood crackling, coals spitting, a pillar of wood that illuminates the forest and makes shadows yawn. 

“Seen her yet?” Zuko snaps. Aang flinches at his tone but keeps his grin easy. 

“No. But we were waiting for you to come back to check the other two,” Aang says. His gaze lands on Katara, who’s firmly fixating on the ground, and now his demeanour falters. “What happened? Is everyone okay?”

“Some people just lost their tempers, that’s all. No ones hurt,” Ty Lee chirps. Aang opens his mouth to argue, Sokka rushing to Katara's side, glaring at _her_ like his sister is the innocent party in all this. “No need to worry.”

“Azula, you're coming with me to watch the other bonfire. Katara, stay with Aang, and Ty Lee, Toph and Sokka you check the other. If there’s nothing after two hours Aang, get Appa and pick us up. We’ll try again in the morning,” Zuko says. He scrambles on to Appa and Aang glances between Katara and her, shifting from foot to foot. “Aang, just fly us over there. It’ll take five minutes. Please.”

“Okay Hot Man. No problem,” he murmurs. Nimbly, he jumps in two short hops to Appa’s crown and Azula hoists herself up. He gives Katara a small smile, and they’re off with a _yip_ , night air rushing past. Azula massages her stomach, where she can already feel the beginning of a bruise forming and the scrapes on her palms. She stares at the back of the Avatar’s head, who hums mindlessly to himself while Zuko stews. He seems torn between wanting to yell at her and trying to keep a lid on his temper, so he settles for shooting her glares and then staring at his feet in remorse.

“Katara isn’t always like this,” Aang says. He twists his head and Azula can see the shell of his ear, the soft planes of his features, relaxed in their sympathy. “She is just protective of the people she loves.”

Azula laughs, but it's humourless. “She doesn’t extend the courtesy to me.”

“One day she might,” Aang replies.

They touch down at the next bonfire, nearly two miles apart, Zuko throwing himself off the saddle in his haste. Aang smiles at her before he goes, and they’re left in the clearing. This fire is smaller, coals burning low, and from their position, ground gently rolling away to the valley and village, the other two glimmers in the distance. It’s a dreary, sparse clearing, skeleton trees reaching their bony fingers to the sky. They look like Kori’s fingers, knotted branches twisted and stooped in their contortion. 

“What did you do?”

There’s a sort of exhaustion settling deep in her bones. Turning them heavy, turning them stone, until they drag her to the ground and Azula cups her head in her hands. Her stomach throbs, palms sting. “I may have said some choice words to the peasant girl.”

Zuko shakes his head, crosses his arms. “Azula. You said you would try.”

“I said I would help you find Mother – not worship the ground your ‘friends’ walk on,” she snorts, and even to herself, her voice sounds whiny, petulant. “I didn’t _do_ anything.”

“So Katara just decided to punch you in the gut for no reason,” Zuko eyeing the hand that clutches her stomach. She curses herself for the weakness and grabs fistfuls of dirt instead. “You have to stop antagonising her.”

She rolls her eyes at Zuko’s tone, so much like Iroh’s that the fat fool might as well be standing there. “So what, I let _your_ friends yell and scream and behave like savages towards me? I just accept it? It’s insulting Zuko.”

“Pride is not the opposite of shame, but it’s source. True humility is the only -,” Zuko pauses, waving his hand awkwardly. “Antidote? Solution?”

_Pride is an acknowledgement of your strength._

She snorts at Zuko’s awkward stuttering. She can feel her eyelids fluttering shut, halfway between conscious and unconscious. Her body is aching in a thousand different ways and dealing with Zuko’s whining is threatening a headache. He waits for an answer and just shrugs when she doesn’t give it. He’s angry, she can tell, but there’s none of his usual foul temper, that all-consuming rage at his inferiority that burnt him up from the inside. He just wanders, hands clasped behind his back, and there’s a feeling in her gut, that twists her stomach into a tight knot, forces her eyes to drop whenever she meets his gaze.

_Weakness. Its weakness. Do something Azula. Stand up. You can’t feel like this._

“This is accomplishing nothing, Zuko.”

The trees rattle. He doesn’t turn his back. Azula pushes herself to her feet, stomach and spine so taught they are about to snap.

“You know, perhaps I wasn’t harsh enough on Katara. It’s a shame that our forefathers didn’t finish off their pathetic little tribe, isn’t it? They should’ve followed the Air Nomads and been wiped off the face of the earth.”

The bonfire burns hotter, sparks winking in and out of existence as wood creaks. She paces to edge of the firelight, Zuko still staring out into the darkness. There’s only a distance of twenty feet between them, but it feels like an eternity, Zuko so still he seems carved out of the same white wood surrounding them.

“I just had a thought Zuko, that Mother hasn’t seen you with that scar. Maybe she’ll think it’s as disgusting as Father did.”

Nothing. Nothing but the empty whistle of its wind, and the complete lack of acknowledgment leaves the retorts sour on her tongue. Azula stands there, clutching her stomach, and it’s a slow, dawning realisation that she looks and feels pathetic. Mad girl yelling empty insults at the wind, with aching bones and bloody palms.

_Father would hate you if he saw you now._

Azula feels her hands drop to her side. She staggers some distance away and sits on the ground. There’s woodsmoke in her lungs, and she’s lightheaded, past, present, future bending into one another until the earth below is the Agni Kai’s cobblestone and the tree trunks Father’s grand hall. 

So, she must be truly mad when eyes appear in the scrub.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow okay. this is my longest chap yet, so thanks to everyone who gets through it. pretty proud of it, but all comments/criticims/feedbaks, are so, so, so helpful even if its just as simple as 'nice' or 'this is total garbage!'
> 
> hope everyone whose reading this is well! thanks to saintamaris, labelleepoque and SirHocus for their comments.


	9. fear is the only reliable way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> marco polo in a ravine this time ladies and gents.

“Who are you?”

The eyes blink. 

_ It’s Ursa. It’s Father. It’s everyone, no one, who hated you and loved you.  _

_ Or, you know, you’re mad. _

Azula squints. The eyes keep staring at her, and she decides that its real, or maybe it’s not, or maybe it’s both, but she can’t be bothered to care at the moment. She watches them, bright and yellow and narrowed in suspicion, streaked with brown like muddy silt. 

_ When Azula had been born, she was told her eyes had been yellow enough that physicians had been called. Her father had been pleased, her mother exhausted from the birth, screamed about devils and curses, wild spirits with yellow fangs, yellow nails and golden eyes that’d crawled in from the night. _

_ Her birth had nearly killed Ursa. _

_ She’d been born on the anniversary of Sozin’s eradication of the Air Nomads, on the burning comet that had given him the power to do so. The day was so sweltering that people collapsed in the streets from exhaustion, animals died, plants wilted, water steamed and every firebender in the nation felt a stupefying mix of intoxication and weakness, drunk on heat and sun. The midwives and physicians had thrown open the shutters in Ursa’s room, cooled her feverish forehead with cloths and fanned her neck sticky with sweat-drenched hairs.  _

_ The heat never stopped climbing. Ursa had suffered complications, and there was growing desperation in the room, a consideration of the impossible.  _

_ At night, she came into the world screaming and clawing and burning, the heat pressing down, and her mother had turned her head when initially presented with her squirming, screaming form, exhausted and fragile and the thought of hot skin on hers enough to make Ursa vomit.  _

_ Ozai brushed her thick headful of hair to the side. He hadn’t been gentle. He saw her golden eyes, and smiled a cold, thin smile, icy in the heat, in the blood and sweat-soaked room and given a short, sharp nod.  _

_ Behind him, Zuko. _

_ Zuko had been born on a cold winter’s day of no importance. When the sky had been overcast, the sunlight weak, the nation sluggish, and Ursa had taken her baby boy with warm brown eyes and clasped him close. Ozai assumed the conditions of the birth a premonition and watched his quiet, pale, firstborn with a clasped jaw. Ursa had seen the anger in her husband’s eyes, and then and there, promised to protect Zuko from that man with tight fists and all-consuming obsessions.  _

_ She’d cried. Azula had screamed her lungs out, and Ursa had clapped her hands over her ears in desperation for quiet. Ozai had scowled at that and left, and Zuko with chubby hands had stepped forward and looked at his sister, scowled. “Be quiet,” he’d whispered. “Stop it. Your making Mum upset.” _

_ A torrent of tears. _

Azula doesn’t know that. She just knows the muddy eyes staring from the bush. They blink once, then a rustle, and their gone, quick enough that it could’ve been a trick of the light. She glances at Zuko, still staring into the darkness, and there’s another rustle. 

A sharp crack, like a stone being struck. 

Zuko flinches, and he draws his swords, blades molten in the firelight. Another crack, then persistent tapping, stone against stone, that echoes around and above the campsite. Zuko glances at her, then stalks over, peering out into the darkness that surrounds them. She stands back to back with Zuko without thinking, and the two of them peer into the sparse scrubland, low lying bush choking bleached stone and trees. It’s hilly, mountainous, with gullies and dips.

_ Perfect for an ambush.  _

Something hurtles out of the darkness – cylindrical, small – Zuko throws his swords up, deflecting a rusty knife. They watch it hit the ground, Zuko sucking a breath in through clenched teeth. It’s total darkness beyond the firelight, and then a stick is thrown, smacking Zuko across the forehead. 

“Show yourself!”

_ How? How did he not get himself killed? Agni’s sake. _

Azula shoves Zuko out of the way. Breathing deep, she circles her arms in long movements, until a slow, shimmering circle of fire is suspended in the dark. It leaves her sweating, knees shaking, and it’s pathetic that her head is spinning from such a basic form, so she puts the anger into her fist, punches the circle’s centre, explodes outwards, illuminating stone, rock, singeing grass, bleaching trees. 

No one.

She stalks around the fire, repeating the form again and again until she’s wiping sweat out of her eyes and panting through clenched teeth. Around them, spot fires burn where her flames have scorched the earth, dying as quick as they spark.

“It might be the girl,” Zuko whispers. He sheathes his swords and picks his way past the bonfire, boots crunching burnt grass. His voice grows louder, face pained. “Azula, stop. You might hit her by accident.”

“Or I might actually give us some form of visibility, Zuzu,” she pants. Her stomach burns, and she can’t catch her breath, the most  _ basic  _ principle of firebending. She gestures at the surroundings, cast in flickering shadows that weave and splay. “What kid carries a knife?”

“Me,” Zuko says. He’s crouched, examining something in the dirt but his voice is so deadpan, and maybe it’s because she’s lightheaded, but Azula actually laughs, really laughs, belly aching snorts that bring tears to her eyes. Zuko stares at her, so caught off guard that he stumbles and pitches forward, scrabbling to regain his balance. 

“We’re not-,” and Azula’s chest is being compressed, “Agni, we’re not exactly a model for a normal family, Zuko.” He blinks, and smiles slowly, a rare, full grin and maybe their kids again, eleven and free and Mother is here, until Zuko turns his head and his scar glistens, the laugh spluttering and dying on her tongue. 

“Don’t – I’m still angry at you Azula.”

He can’t muster the tone to make her take the threat seriously. “When are you not? What are you staring at?”

“Footprints. Child’s,” he points to the ground at his feet, then further, the path leading into the darkness, “There. There. They’re leading away from this fire.” He points to a scraggly bush, top flattened, a blurry shape just past the fire’s light. “That looks crushed. I think she was lying there, watching us. She must have been in the area and was drawn to the firelight.”

“Kori  _ said _ she was hunting. Maybe this is the best spot to catch vermin,” she says, shrugs. She examines the footprint in the ground and hates to admit it, but Zuko is right. It’s the size of a child’s foot, sunk deep into the clay. “If it’s her, why would she throw a knife at our heads? Well,  _ your _ head.”

“Maybe the child lost in the middle of nowhere could be a bit frightened.” 

Deadpan again, and Azula feels her mouth quirk slightly, soothes it back into a firm line. They could’ve been anyone, so why the aggression? “Should we follow them?”

Zuko smirks. It’s an irritating expression on him. “You’re asking for my opinion?”

“And now, I’m never going to make that mistake again,” she snaps, “Should we, or should we not? I’m confident that even you could defend yourself against a child.”

Zuko furrows his forehead. Safer, easier to stay by the fire, to try again in the morning. 

_ It’s a practical option. But it’s not compassionate. It’s not heroic. It’s not honourable. _

“We’re going after her,” he says, and Zuko strides into the darkness steps sure, palm held outward, chin forward, as a hero and a prince would. Azula groans audibly, because she knows it’ll annoy him, and shakes her head. 

_ Idiot. Stupid, compassionate, idiot.  _

She’s still exhausted from the fight with Katara, so she drags her feet over the stony ground. Zuko holds a flame in his palm and keeps it low, peering at the earth for clues. A footprint here. An indent there. Snapped branches, dislodged flowers. The trail leads out from the camp, and in the black of night, their surroundings shrink to Zuko’s palm and whatever moonlight peeks from behind the clouds. At their back, the village and valley, ahead miles of scrubland, and they spend what feels like an eternity walking. Zuko pauses to scorch whatever he can find to mark their path, the firelight slowly dwindling to a speck of orange in the distance. Azula can feel the ground slope underneath their feet, the white trees curving, peaks slowly guiding them downwards, darker, deeper.

The birds call, and it sounds like laughter.

They stand at the edge of a small ravine. Around, miles of scrubland. Ahead, a cavern where a giant has carved out a slice of land, or a long-dead riverbed where water once leapt and battered the stone, walls bleached white, littered with driftwood. It bends and twists, like a snake. 

_ I would stage an ambush here. _

Zuko bites his lip. He glances at her, and the whites of his eyes are blinding before wordlessly pointing at the trail that leads downwards. 

_ This is stupid. This is mind-numbingly stupid. This is clearly a trap Azula – there isn’t a girl, there isn’t anything, and you're going to get yourself killed by following Zuko of all people, whose intelligence is close to a rat’s – and he’s walking down the cavern. _

Azula bites her palm to stop herself from screaming in frustration and follows him down. It’s steep. Shale. They slip and stagger until they stand at the bottom, the walls stretching over their head. Walk on the damp sand. Climb over dead limbs, no end in sight, nothing but the stone that weeps water and Azula’s always prided herself on her will, but her nerves are nearly shot, teeth clattering from the cold and –

Zuko shouts at her to follow, panicked, desperate, something in the distance, and he blinks out of sight around a corner. She is sprinting until her lungs burn, the eyes again, a figure crouched in the darkness behind a cluster of boulders and - 

There’s a flash of silver in moonlight and –

Azula’s connecting with a body, hand-stretched out, yanking a shoulder. The silver flying wide. She gets an elbow to the nose, pain so bright her head spins, it’s knobbly knees and desperate scratching, Azula pulling the figure against her body, locking an arm around their throat, until their hands slap weakly and – 

Azula drops them to the ground, and they cough and splutter, clawing at their throat, bends a flame. 

It’s the girl.

In the light, the eyes have a head, a body. The girl can’t be older than ten. She glares at Azula with red-rimmed eyes, tan skin crisscrossed with scars, jet black hair scraped back into a bun. Her face is hawkish, shrew, glaring  _ at _ _ Azula  _ with a deep, all-consuming ferocity and world-weariness - an elderly lady sitting squat inside the bones of a skinny child. Azula’s nose is on fire, and every time she blinks, fireworks explode across her vision. It’s an effort to not bring the flame in her palm closer, to singe every hair off this miserable child’s head.

_ Zuko. The gaggle of idiots. Be careful. You’re better than petty revenge.  _

They stare at each other. The child, so scrawny, seems to shrink away, presses herself into the dirt. Azula breathes and hisses with pain when she exhales through her nose, so her words come out half-strangled. “Who are you?”

“No one.”

The kid has the guts to look indignant. Azula crouches down, tilts the flame close enough to the child that it’s hot enough to be uncomfortable, but not to burn. “I’m going to ask this once, and once only, and you do not want to lie to me. Do you live in that village down there?” The girl startles and clamps her jaw shut, but the reaction is telling. “Is your mother named Kori?”

The name catches her off guard. “What!?”

“Yes or no.”

Gritted teeth. “Yes.”

_ Thank Agni. _

“Name?”

If she could, the girl would burn her alive, “Izumi.”

Satisfied, Azula releases the fire from her palm. In the moonlight, the hollows on the girl’s cheeks are stark, and she tucks her ankles underneath herself. Yet, she meets Azula’s gaze, spine straight. “Why were you following us?”

“I wasn’t,” Izumi retorts. Azula feels her teeth grind, but the girl crosses her arms, “I said, I’m not. I didn’t mean to.”

“Agni, your mother sent us,” Azula snaps, and that finally gets the child to stop pouting, to tuck her ankles closer, “Answer the question.”

“I got lost hunting rabbits,” Izumi whispers, “And I saw him.”

“My brother?”

_ Why would a peasant girl be interested in the Fire Lord? Why would she throw a knife at him? How would she even recognise him? Zuko must have announced his reign, but how would a backwater peasant know his features? Her brother – perhaps he heard rumours about the banished Fire Lord’s son? Met him?  _

“Do you know who I am? Who that boy is?”

Izumi nods. Her face is furious. “He’s the new Fire Lord. Everyone knows that, after his proclamation.”

_ Please, go ahead, erase what’s left of Father’s legacy Zuko.  _

“How did you recognise him?”

Izumi waves a hand, “My brother said he had a scar on his face. Everyone knows him in the army. He got banished for disobeying.”

_ For all its ugliness, the scar is easily identifiable.  _

“And me?”

The girl blinks. She stares at Azula’s face, at her shorn scalp and bruised eyes. It takes her a second to put the pieces together. “You’re Princess Azula.”

Azula can’t help but be impressed with Izumi’s tenacity. Azula scoffs, keeps her tone light. “Even in a hovel, you know us. As you should, of course.”

“Aren’t Princesses not supposed to be dirty?”

Azula narrows her eyes, and Izumi claps a hand over her mouth. She staggers to her feet and bows, and even if it’s proper courtesy, it feels wrong somehow. A starving ten-year-old with knobbly elbows bowing and scraping. “Stand up. Stop it.”

“M’sorry Most Gracious Honourable Princess,” the girl murmurs. Ducks her head lower, “I didn’t mean – M’ sorry.”

_ Father above, face hard as she scrapes and bows lower, touching her forehead to the soft, cool wood, as the fire burns above and below, her muscles aching. “I didn’t mean – I’m sorry. I’ll master the forms Father. I’ll do anything.” Flinching as he steps closer, and she can’t stop the apologies even as she’s screaming at herself to shut up, be quiet, don’t be like Zuko – _

A tree creeks, catapulting her to the present. The memory leaves her throat dry. “You’re forgiven.”

The girl stands up but averts her gaze. Izumi fiddles with her hands, casting her eyes around the clearing, searching. Azula bends a flame and holds it up. There, amongst the dirt, is the knife. Azula walks backward, keeping her eyes firmly on the girl, picking up the blade. It’s age-spotted, but in the past, it would’ve been fine, with an ivory handle and a dragon roaring on the hilt. She stalks back to Izumi, whose gaze is desperate, mouth clamped shut. 

_ She really is trying to negotiate with you.  _

“Why were you trying to hurt the Fire Lord?”

The girl, if it’s possible, shrinks lower. Ties her hands into knots but shuffles closer. It’s a simple ploy, and Azula lets her grip loosen. Izumi leaps, snatching the knife out of her grip, clutches it tight to her chest. She glares at Azula with a ferocity that rivals the dragons on the hilt, daring her to take it back, to strike, to hit, to burn. “You can’t have it. It’s mine.”

_ Clever and ferocious. _

“I don’t want your knife. I want answers,” she says, and pauses. Sympathy is easy to fake. It’s plying smiles and moist eyes. Lower your voice an octave and clutch their hands. Azula had never quite understood the point of it – how to use it, yes, but not its purpose. It was weak. It was lowering yourself to another, ripping open your chest and pointing to your heart and saying,  _ crawl right in between my ribs and make a home.  _ So, it must be fake when she whispered, “You can tell me. I want to hurt him too.”

The world pauses. Izumi shakes her head. Azula just looks at her, and for a moment, she’s ten again – shaking after one of Mother’s lectures, trying to stuff her tears back into their sockets.

“It’s all right,” she says, and Azula surprises herself at how soft her voice is.

“Ukano was sent to the war, but there’s no war anymore. He sent a letter saying he was a prisoner in a camp – in the Earth Kingdom. They’re putting him on trial, with the Fire Lord’s blessing,” Izumi murmurs, but her voice breaks, “I just want him home. Why can’t he come home? My brother can’t – he wouldn’t  _ do  _ anything.”

_ Zuko is letting Fire Nation troops be tried? For what – for doing their duty? For serving their country with honour? _

“And you thought stabbing the Fire Lord would change that?” 

She shakes her head. “No – maybe. I do’t know.”

Agni, she’s going to burn Zuko alive. The impulse strikes her, and Azula swaddles the girl’s hands in her own. Small enough that they disappear, bony twigs with felt stretched across. “You have to be smarter than that. You have to think.” 

“I just want him home.”

_ She’s never coming home. She left you.  _

“He’s not coming home.”

“I miss him,” the girl says, and she starts crying. Quietly. Keening, the grief shakes her body. Izumi tries to stand tall, force the sobs back in, but it makes her hiccup until she’s choking on her own grief. Tugs her hands out of Azula’s grip and furiously wipes at her eyes. The blade knicks her forehead, and she’s smearing blood and tears together, pale pink water, but she’s too distraught to notice. Azula doesn’t know what to do.

_ You never did. It’s too much – isn’t it? The emotion. The hurt. You're scared of her, you fool. The Princess of the Fire Nation fears a little girl _

The weakness disgusts her. The crying makes her ears ring. She wants to slap the kid. She wants to grab her by the shoulders, point at the dead trees, at the laughing man’s portrait, at her own eyes, stained purple, and scream at her that life isn’t fair, that people die, people fail, people leave, and that your only comfort is yourself. That to need is to be weak. Instead, Azula wrings her hands and prays that Zuko will come blundering around the corner, that Izumi will just  _ stop crying.  _

“Stop it.”

The ravine weeps with the girl, cries bouncing up and down its walls. It sounds like lost daughters, dead sons, and grieving mothers. All collectively howling their grief into the night. 

“I said, stop it!”

Her head snaps to attention. Izumi blinks at Azula, eyes river water brown, Earth Kingdom brown and golden streaked. 

“What is crying going to do?”

The girl hiccups. Her shoulders jerk. 

“Nothing. It’s going to do  _ nothing _ ,” Azula says, each word precise, firm, “Your stupid plan might’ve got you, and maybe me killed, and left your mother alone.”

The realization strikes the kid. At the mention of Kori, Izumi deflates, hugs her bony shoulders close, gathers herself up. Voice small, “She’s looking for me?”

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

“She never realises I’m gone,” Izumi says. The words slither over her teeth, choked with shame, “She always liked Ukano better.”

It’s a punch to the gut. 

Azula’s vision blurs, and she can see the old woman in her hut. The shrine to the brother. The small, empty closet. The woman’s watery, murky eyes as she lovingly stroked the picture of her son. There’s bitterness on Azula’s tongue and throat. This child – this stupid kid with her bony fingers – had been stupid. So utterly, mind-numbingly stupid. 

_ But she’d been brave. She tried to do something. Look at her. There’s steel in her spine. _

“Your mother is a fool then,” Azula snaps, “But so are you for trying to assassinate the Fire Lord with a rusty knife.”

“Are you going to tell him? Is he going to hurt me?”

That makes her laugh. It’s funny to picture Zuko trying to punish a child. She glances around the ravine – twists and turns, no sign of him. She grabs Izumi’s elbow and starts tugging her along the path. “No. He won’t hurt you. But we’re taking you home to your Mother.”

“Why don’t you?”

It stops Azula in her tracks. Technically, she should. Technically, it’s an assassination attempt on a Royal Family member. Azula can remember what happened to those that Father caught. Their desperate pleading, dragged by hands and feet to the deepest, darkest, foulest dungeons. 

_ A man kneeling in front of Father. His pleas. He holds up his hands like a beggar, a bowl of leathery skin, asking for grace, for mercy. She kneels next to Ozai, and the man doesn’t know, couldn’t know, the tiny changes in his face as he rises to his feet with a fox smile. He tells her to watch carefully, to understand what the nation does to traitors, to cowards, to Zukos. _

Izumi starts tapping her foot in impatience. 

_ You like her. _

“You amuse me,” Azula settles on, twist to her mouth. The words are true, but the sensation of being watched crawls over her shoulders. “The Fire Nation doesn’t waste its time on punishing brave fools.:

Izumi swells at the backhand compliment. Allows herself to be led down the path, eventually tugging her arms out of Azula’s grip. She swaggers on ahead, swishing the knife back and forth in the air.

_ Surprisingly good control. _

The path is treacherous. Azula trips, trips again, balance woozy and head still aching from the elbow. Izumi shakes her head and tells her to hurry up, then claps a hand over her mouth when Azula reminds her exactly who happened to discover her. Izumi ducks and dances her way through the rocks and shale without effort, feet light.

_ Ursa clutches Azula’s hands. Points at the spirit with laughing eyes, long limbs. “It’s a dancer, Azula. They dance the night away,” she says, frowns when Azula stabs a chubby finger at its curling horns, exclaims they look like the battering rams on a warship. “Azula, please. Not everything has to be about fighting – _

It’s a mouthful of dirt. Azula wipes the dust out of her mouth, staggers to her feet. Kicks the offending piece of wood, bruises her toes. 

_ Your acting like Zuko. This anger. Control yourself. _

Eventually, the path narrows. It ends in a sheer wall, stars above. A pool at its centre. Long dead waterfall, and at its base, a flickering orange, a distant figure. Zuko. A strong, stiff breeze cools the sweat on Azula’s neck, which she didn’t know was there. She picks at the callouses on her fingernails. She knows this emotion – distantly, painfully, like she knows the nobles at Father’s courts, the annoying ones who pressed for peace, for settlement, for surrender. It’s painful and irritating. 

_ It's fear. Your feeling fear. You don’t know what that’s like, do you? Especially fear of Zuko, of all people. Coward. Useless. Should’ve left the monster to rot in its cell.  _

Whatever energy Izumi possessed disappears. She pulls her shoulders tighter. She looks like a smudge on the world. “I don’t want to go back.”

_ Please don’t make me go back, Father. _

“Why?”

“Mums going to be so mad,” she whispers. Izumi clutches the rusty knife closer to her chest. “She’s going to be really, really mad. I’m scared.” It strikes Azula then that perhaps the knife belongs to her brother. 

_ They hate you, but you don’t care. Look at the bruises on your stomach if you need proof. _

Azula crosses her arms. Cautiously, she bumps Izumi with her hip, winces when she staggers slightly. “Don’t be. Fear is pointless.”

Izumi nods but doesn’t move. Azula chews on her lip. She can’t convince her to walk another step. Force her, and she might just bolt into the ravine again. Command her as sovereign, but the girl clearly doesn’t respect authority.

_ Can’t use the usual tactics, can you? Go on. Maybe if you threaten her, play the monster, she’ll go screaming back into Mother’s arms. Don’t pretend you don’t enjoy it. _

That disgusting, shameful emotion, chokes Azula’s throat. It’s Izumi’s voice that knocks her out of her trance, full of wonder. Like Azula’s a particularly pretty stone, or an interesting bird, a novelty to be savoured. “You’re scared.”

“ _ What  _ did you just say to me?” Azula spits, rounds on the figure. She doesn’t care that it’s a child. Doesn’t care that the creature amuses her. To see it is unacceptable. To name it is worse. 

Undeterred, the girl ploughs onward. “I said, you're scared. Of going down there. Your so scared.”

“Your tempting me to leave you here.”

“Yeah, but your still gunna be scared.”

“I AM NOT SCARED,” Azula screams, hoarse, rough, the volume making Izumi flinch. It bounces off the cavern walls, and she sees Zuko’s figure stagger, glaring in their direction, starting towards them. She forces herself to breathe, to find her composure again. “A Fire Lord doesn’t feel fear. Hence, I don’t feel fear.”

“That stupid.”

_ A child just called you stupid. A backwater child. I would be surprised if she could write her own name. _

“Everyone gets scared. Mum says everyone’s afraid, all the time. Even Fire Lords must get scared sometimes then.”

_ Brain-damaged from malnourishment. Should’ve left her. Don’t look at her. She’ll see you. _

Slow, grinding dread in her gut. Zuko won’t believe she tried to help Izumi. They’ll believe she managed to rendezvous with someone, anyone. Fly her back to the Palace, to the cell. Clap chains over her wrists. Turn as grey as the walls, curl in the corner, until she just vanishes into the stone, a discoloured smudge on a stained wall. An unpleasant footnote in Zuko’s glorious reign. Azula’s words come out through gritted teeth and she shoves the girl in the back. “I don’t take advice from a child. Now walk.”

They step forward, together. The path in front, and it’s dark and windy, shale spotted, deadened. It’s exhausting to walk. It’s exhausting to imagine talking to Zuko. Azula touches the bruises under her eyes, and maybe its dirt, but it comes away purple and yellow, aching. 

“Is she going to hate me?”

_ They’re all going to hate you. Father hates you. You have to earn his love. It’s not given. Love is never given freely. _

The words drip. They splatter. “Who?”

“My Mum.”

_ Of course, she will. What Mother doesn’t? _

“Does it matter?”

“Yes – I mean. I think?”

_ Use this. Her eyes are adoring. You’re her saviour, her sovereign. _

“She won’t. If you do what I say.”

Azula places an arm on the girl’s shoulder. It burns to the touch. Izumi looks at her and sees the world. When Azula smiles, it’s her court smile, and Agni, it hurts, pulls her lips too tight. “I need you to wait. Then, I need you to tell everyone in the village the Fire Lord’s sister escaped." 

_ “Her eyes,” Ursa had muttered. “Her eyes are burning,” she’d breathed. Hours after the initial refusal, pain addled from birth she’d taken Azula’s cleaned and swaddled form. Azula had lain silent, fists clenched. Ursa touched her forehead and for a second, imagined scooping out those burning eyes, replacing them with brown, with mud, with anything that meant normal life. It repulsed her. It frightened her. It was a disgusting thought, but Ursa can’t stand to look at her daughter, because they're Ozai’s eyes, with their burning, blood-soaked lineage.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, once again, thanks for reading! keeping my updates more consistent and i hope you enjoy this chap as always. thank you to all my lovely commenters, continued readers and newcomers. 
> 
> life's been good and busy. currently re watching avatar + schoolwork, but the next chap is pretty much finished so expect a quickish update (can't promise it thou). criticism always appreciated + don't be afraid to give harsh feedback. only helps me grow.


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